Meditation Has Limited Benefits, Study Finds Mindfulness meditation can ease stress but won't curb problems like being overweight

A review of medical literature finds meditation can't hurt, might help. Getty Images

Certain types of meditation may provide some modest relief from anxiety, depression and pain, a new study found.

But the study found little evidence for other reported benefits of meditation, including help in curbing substance abuse, poor eating habits, sleep disorders and weight problems.

The report, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, reviewed the findings from 47 previous studies, all randomized clinical trials, with 3,515 adult participants in total.

Many people use meditation to ease stress and promote general health. The purpose of the report was to examine the accumulated evidence to help doctors determine how best to counsel patients on the possible benefits and limitations of meditation, said Madhav Goyal, assistant professor of general internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the report's lead researcher.

In each of the underlying studies, participants received professional instruction in one of two types of meditation: mantra meditation or mindfulness meditation. A popular form of mantra meditation is transcendental meditation, which involves repetition of a phrase "in such a way that it transcends one to an effortless state where focused attention is absent," the study said. By contrast, mindfulness meditation emphasizes training in "present-focused awareness," or mindfulness. The study noted that the distinctions between the meditation types aren't always clear.

Researchers found that only mindfulness meditation produced some benefits. For example, the improvement in patients with mild symptoms of depression was similar in magnitude to what might be expected from the use of an antidepressant, the study said. It also noted that there were few mantra-meditation studies to include in the JAMA review, which could help account for the lack of evidence of benefits from this type of meditation.

The study didn't find any evidence meditation was harmful.

Researchers culled through nearly 19,000 previous studies on meditation to select the most scientific. Dr. Goyal said his team used rigorous inclusion criteria. Each of the 47 included studies was a controlled trial in which at least one group received either a therapy with known psychological benefits, such as exercise, or a placebo instructional or educational session, he said. Studies that looked only at children or adolescents, or those without a control group, were excluded.

"Although uncontrolled studies have usually found a benefit of meditation, very few controlled studies have found a similar benefit for the effects of meditation programs on health-related behaviors affected by stress," the JAMA report said.

The report's findings show that meditation is perhaps less effective in alleviating stress-related symptoms than is widely believed, said Allan H. Goroll, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School-Massachusetts General Hospital, in invited commentary also published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. "The studies overall failed to show much benefit from meditation with regard to relief of suffering or improvement in overall health, with the important exception that mindfulness meditation provided a small but possibly meaningful degree of relief from psychological distress," he wrote.

Still, Dr. Goroll noted that participants only received 30 to 40 hours of training in meditation, which could indicate that "meditation is a skill that takes time to master." He also said more evidence is needed to draw more robust conclusions about any benefits to meditation.

"People come to a meditation class because they're suffering in some way," said Jon Aaron, an instructor at New York Insight Meditation Center, which promotes mindfulness meditation. Through meditation, they learn to relate to their stress in a way that is more productive, he said.