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The practice of meditation reduces stress in patients with breast cancer
Meditation helps to improve the emotional state of everyone.
EDITORIAL GOOD LIFE
16:19 | 30.10.2009
Transcendental meditation reduces stress and improves emotional and mental well-being of breast cancer patients, suggest the findings of a recent study.
The two-year study included 130 patients at Saint Joseph Hospital in Chicago, over 55 years, randomly assigned to a transcendental meditation group or a control group that received usual care. Quality of life was assessed every six months.
"The emotional and psychosocial stress contributes to the initiation and progression of breast cancer and cancer mortality," he said in a press release from the Saint Joseph Hospital study author Nidich Sanford, principal investigator of the Maharishi Institute of Natural Medicine and Prevention Management University in Fairfield, Iowa.
"The technique of transcendental meditation reduces stress and improves emotional and mental health in older patients with breast cancer. Women in the study found that the meditation practice was easy to carry out at home, and reported significant benefits in quality of life in general, "said Nidich.
"It's wonderful that now doctors have a variety of interventions to use, even transcendental meditation, to benefit cancer patients. I think this method should be appreciated and used more widely, " he said in the press release the author of the study, Dr. Rhoda Pomerantz, chief of gerontology at Saint Joseph Hospital.
The study, published in a recent issue of the journal Integrative Cancer Therapies, was funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health USA.
