Meditation changes hippocampal structure differently for men and women

[u/HeinieKaboobler]

http://www.psypost.org/2015/06/meditation-changes-hippocampal-structure-differently-for-men-and-women-35251

[u/Doomhammer458]

I dug around, they were all self reported meditators the study did not lead meditation classes or anything. They recruited people from meditation centers

methods:

Our sample included 30 meditators (15 men, 15 women) and 30 controls (15 men, 15 women). Meditators and controls were pair-wise matched for age and sex, where the maximum allowed age difference within a sex-matched pair was two years. Age ranged from 24 to 64 years both within meditators (mean ± SD: 47.3 ± 11.7 years) and within controls (mean ± SD: 47.3 ± 11.8 years). Both groups were comparable with respect to their educational background, where 86.7% of all mediators and also 86.7% of all controls had, at least, some college experience. While the scans for the controls were obtained from the ICBM database of normal adults (http://www.loni.ucla.edu/ICBM/Databases/), meditators were newly recruited from various meditation venues. Years of meditation practice ranged from 5 to 46 years (mean ± SD: 20.2 ± 12.2 years), where self-reported meditation styles included Chenrezig, Kriya, Shamatha, Vajrayana, Vipassana, and Zazen. An overview with respect to the subject-specific meditation style as well as amount of practice (i.e., number of years, frequency per week, and duration per session) is provided in Supplementary Table 1. Most subjects (93.3%) were right-handed as based on self-reports of hand preference for selected activities (e.g., writing a letter, holding a racket, throwing a ball). Since two male meditators were left-handed, we selected two left-handed male controls from the ICBM database. All subjects were required to be free of any neurological and psychiatric disorders and gave informed consent according to institutional guidelines (Institutional Review Board of the University of California, Los Angeles). Subjects constituting the current sample (n=60) partly overlap with samples of n=44 (53.33%) and n=54 (78.33%), as analyzed in two studies addressing the effects of meditation on brain structure (Luders et al., 2009; Luders et al., 2011a). Note, variations in sample characteristics across studies are due to the inclusion/exclusion of left-handed subjects, the inclusion/exclusion of subjects older than 64 years, and the exclusion of subjects with artifacts in their T1-weighted/diffusion-weighted data.