More on the Health Benefits of Mindfulness
I’ve been pointing people to Ruth Baer’s (2003) meta-analysis of the benefits of mindfulness (available in crystal-clear PDF format on David Fresco’s web site) for some time, as an excellent introduction to and overview of the current mindfulness research.
Today, via Marshall (via Drew), I learned about a new meta-analysis that is in publication in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, exploring the health benefits of mindfulness:
J Psychosom Res. 2004 Jul;57(1):35-43.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits. A meta-analysis.
Grossman P, Niemann L, Schmidt S, Walach H.
Freiburg Institute for Mindfulness Research, Konradstr. 32, 79100 Freiburg, Germany.
OBJECTIVE: Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is a structured group program that employs mindfulness meditation to alleviate suffering associated with physical, psychosomatic and psychiatric disorders. The program, nonreligious and nonesoteric, is based upon a systematic procedure to develop enhanced awareness of moment-to-moment experience of perceptible mental processes. The approach assumes that greater awareness will provide more veridical perception, reduce negative affect and improve vitality and coping. In the last two decades, a number of research reports appeared that seem to support many of these claims. We performed a comprehensive review and meta-analysis of published and unpublished studies of health-related studies related to MBSR.
METHODS: Sixty-four empirical studies were found, but only 20 reports met criteria of acceptable quality or relevance to be included in the meta-analysis. Reports were excluded due to (1) insufficient information about interventions, (2) poor quantitative health evaluation, (3) inadequate statistical analysis, (4) mindfulness not being the central component of intervention, or (5) the setting of intervention or sample composition deviating too widely from the health-related MBSR program. Acceptable studies covered a wide spectrum of clinical populations (e.g., pain, cancer, heart disease, depression, and anxiety), as well as stressed nonclinical groups. Both controlled and observational investigations were included. Standardized measures of physical and mental well-being constituted the dependent variables of the analysis.
RESULTS: Overall, both controlled and uncontrolled studies showed similar effect sizes of approximately 0.5 (PCONCLUSION: Although derived from a relatively small number of studies, these results suggest that MBSR may help a broad range of individuals to cope with their clinical and nonclinical problems.
PMID: 15256293 [PubMed - in process]
If you’re one of the lucky few with institutional passwords to the full-text version, see the original page at PubMed for the relevant links and the PI’s e-mail address.
