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Investigating the impact of meditation training on mental health and wellbeing in the ageing population

Objective

As the number of older people in Europe grows, increasing healthy life years is a priority. Cognitive decline, dementia (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease, AD), sleep disturbances and depression, all related to psychological distress and anxiety, are significant drivers of reduced quality of life in older adults. This project builds on evidence that lifestyle factors and meditation practice have the potential to downregulate these adverse factors and positively impact mental and neurological conditions including AD. Our main objectives are i) to improve early AD detection and understanding of physiopathological mechanisms; and to investigate ii) the impact of internal/external (e.g. genetic and lifestyle) determinants and iii) the effect and mechanisms of action of meditation training, on mental health and wellbeing in older people. This will be achieved by using pre-existing databases from European partners and conducting two randomized controlled trials (Studies 1 and 2B) and one observational study (2A). STUDY 1 will assess the short-term effects of an 8-week meditation intervention (versus cognitive training) in patients with subjective cognitive decline at risk for AD on behavioural measures including anxiety and wellbeing. STUDY 2A will assess senior expert meditators to identify neural signatures of different meditation practices on attention and emotion regulation tasks. STUDY 2B will assess long-term effects of an 18-month meditation intervention (versus an active control) on behavioural and biological markers of mental health and wellbeing in cognitively intact elderly. The cognitive and affective regulatory mechanisms underlying these effects will be investigated using the neural signatures identified in the expert meditators. High public health relevance is likely: the proposed intervention targets the most common mental and neurological conditions in the elderly and it can be scaled up within preventive programmes at a population level.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

RIA - Research and Innovation action

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-PHC-2014-2015

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Coordinator

INSTITUT NATIONAL DE LA SANTE ET DE LA RECHERCHE MEDICALE
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 4 014 753,81
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 4 137 116,31

Participants (13)

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