Meditation a powerful pain reliever

Meditation can lead to a dramatic reduction in pain, according to new research.

Researchers found that an hour's meditation can reduce pain better than some pain-relieving drugs.

"This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation," said Dr Fadel Zeidan, at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre, North Carolina, who led the study.

For the study, 15 healthy volunteers who had never meditated attended four, 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as focused attention.

Focused attention is a form of mindfulness meditation where people are taught to focus on breathing and let go of distracting thoughts and emotions.

Both before and after meditation training, the study volunteers brain activity was examined using a special type of imaging -- arterial spin labelling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL MRI).

This captures longer duration brain processes, such as meditation, better than a standard MRI scan of brain function.

During the scans, a pain-inducing heat device was placed on the volunteers' right legs.

The device heated a small area of their skin to 120° Fahrenheit, a temperature that most people find painful, over a 5-minute period.

The scans taken after meditation training showed that everyone's pain ratings fell, with reductions ranging from 11 to 93 percent, Dr Zeidan said.

At the same time, meditation significantly reduced brain activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, an area of the brain involved in creating the feeling of where and how intense a painful stimulus is.

The scans taken before meditation training showed activity in this area was very high.

However, when participants were meditating during the scans, the researchers could not detect activity in the pain-processing region.

Meditation also increased brain activity in other areas of the brain, including the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula and the orbito-frontal cortex.

The researchers suggested that one of the reasons meditation was an effective pain reliever was because it affected more than just one place of the brain.

Dr Zeidan said: "We found a big effect – about a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness.

"Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25 percent."

The researchers believe that meditation has great potential for clinical use because so little training was required to produce the dramatic pain-relieving effects.

"This study shows that meditation produces real effects in the brain and can provide an effective way for people to substantially reduce their pain without medications," Dr Zeidan said.

This article was published on Wed 6 April 2011