NCCAM Hosts Meditation Workshop
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On July 8 and 9, 2008, experts from a wide range of fields and disciplines who share a common interest in meditation for health purposes—including researchers, clinicians, specialists in clinical trial design, and meditation-scholar practitioners—gathered in Bethesda, Maryland, to assess current scientific knowledge and identify areas of opportunity for future research.
The workshop drew 65 attendees from three countries and was cosponsored by NCCAM, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Aging, and the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences—as well as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
"Meditation for health purposes," says NCCAM Director Josephine P. Briggs, M.D., "is a part of mind-body medicine, a group of therapies that may alter the physical response to diseases—especially those that are chronic, have a link to stress, and are often difficult to manage and treat. Part of building the evidence base on CAM will include building the evidence, carefully and thoughtfully, on meditation's biological effects."
The workshop's participants identified a number of areas for focus in future research, including the following:
- Fundamental biological research on the neural mechanisms activated by meditation and influences on the rest of the body, including genetic influences on these responses.
- Developing meditation-based treatments tailored as closely as possible to specific disorders and populations.
- Pursuing a variety of study types and designs, from epidemiological and observational studies to investigations of effectiveness and safety.
- Increasing the array of validated and standardized measures, tools, and language that are available to investigators to define the meditative experience.
- Improving control group design.
- Supporting collaborative and interdisciplinary research teams. Relevant fields include basic and clinical science, translational science, contemplative practices, clinical trial design, medicine, and biostatistics.
"The shared focus in this workshop among participants with widely diverse backgrounds," says co-chair Susan Folkman, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, "provided a clear framework for panel presentations and discussions and allowed ideas to evolve that led to useful recommendations." Co-chair Margaret A. Chesney, Ph.D., of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, said, "The workshop was a very effective, highly interactive forum. One of its important contributions was providing impetus for those present to agree that research is needed to build the evidence base, with developmental work as an important prerequisite."
NCCAM's lead planner for the workshop, program officer Catherine M. Stoney, Ph.D., also noted the workshop's uniqueness and diversity as well as "the ability of non-meditation researchers to contribute quite valuable and relevant insights, which in turn were integrated into the final recommendations."
A more detailed executive summary of this workshop is posted in our News section.
