Having a high sense of purpose in life may lower your risk of heart disease and stroke, according to a new study led by researchers at Mount Sinai St. Luke's and Mount Sinai Roosevelt

The new analysis defined purpose in life as a sense of meaning and direction, and a feeling that life is worth living. Previous research has linked purpose to psychological health and well-being, but the new Mount Sinai analysis found that a high sense of purpose is associated with a 23% reduction in death from all causes and a 19% reduced risk of heart attack, stroke, or the need for coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG) or a cardiac stenting procedure. "Developing and refining your sense of purpose could protect your heart health and potentially save your life," says lead study author Randy Cohen, MD, a preventive cardiologist at Mount Sinai St. Luke's and Mount Sinai Roosevelt. "Our study shows there is a strong relationship between having a sense of purpose in life and protection from dying or having a cardiovascular event. As part of our overall health, each of us needs to ask ourselves the critical question of 'do I have a sense of purpose in my life?' If not, you need to work toward the important goal of obtaining one for your overall well-being." The research team reviewed 10 relevant studies with the data of more than 137,000 people to analyze the impact of sense of purpose on death rates and risk of cardiovascular events. The meta-analysis also found that those with a low sense of purpose are more likely to die or experience cardiovascular events. "Prior studies have linked a variety of psychosocial risk factors to heart disease, including negative factors such as anxiety and depression and positive factors such as optimism and social support," says Alan Rozanski, MD, study co-author and Director of Wellness and Prevention Programs for Mount Sinai Heart at the Mount Sinai Health System. "Based on our findings, future research should now further assess the importance of life purpose as a determinant of health and well-being and assess the impact of strategies designed to improve individuals' sense of life purpose."

Meditation might be an effective treatment for reducing chronic neck pain

Chronic neck pain can lead to serious comorbidities like depression. Patients with chronic neck pain frequently experience distress. Meditation has been increasingly used as a supportive treatment for individuals with chronic pain. Previous research has shown that chronic pain is associated with distress and that meditation has stress relieving benefits. German researchers compared the effects of meditation on pain, perceived stress and psychological well being. They hypothesized that an eight-week meditation program will decrease pain more effectively than a standardized exercise program and that pain relief will coincide with stress reduction. For the study, 89 patients with chronic neck pain who showed increased perceived stress were randomized into meditation and exercise program groups. Outcomes were assessed at baseline and after eight weeks. Results showed that meditation training significantly reduced pain when compared to the exercise group and pain-related "bothersomeness" decreased more in the meditation group as well. No significant differences between meditation and exercise were found for pain during movement, pain disability, psychological scores and quality of life, which is consistent with the known benefits of exercise on pain-related outcomes. The authors concluded that meditation has unique benefits for producing pain relief and for pain coping.

There's an easy way to beat the workday blues, researchers find, and it doesn't take long: Go for a walk a few times a week during your lunch break

In a study of 75 "physically inactive" people — that is, those who engage in less than 150 weekly minutes of moderate exercise — researchers divided subjects into a walking and a non-walking group (whose members weren't left out: They acted as a control group, then started walking later in the study). Walkers took 30-minute strolls three times during the workweek and twice on weekends. In surveys, walkers said that they felt more enthusiastic and more relaxed than non-walkers. They were also less nervous after their walks, and they felt better in the afternoons on walking days than on other days. They saw physical health benefits, too. Plus, bosses shouldn't mind: "There is now quite strong research evidence that feeling more positive and enthusiastic at work is very important to productivity," a researcher said. “So we would expect that people who walked at lunchtime would be more productive.” One caveat: The study's participants were almost all women, so more research is needed to generalize to men. (Walking might be able to help fight the effects of excessive sitting.)

Might living a structured life with regularly established meal times and early bedtimes lead to a better life and perhaps even prevent the onset of mental illness?

That's what's suggested in a study led by Kai-Florian Storch, PhD, of the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and McGill University. Our daily sleep-wake cycle is governed by an internal 24-hour timer, the circadian clock. However, there is evidence that daily activity is also influenced by rhythms much shorter than 24 hours, which are known as ultradian rhythms and follow a four-hour cycle. Most prominently observed in infants before they are able to sleep through the night, ultradian rhythms may explain why, on average, we eat three meals a day that are relatively evenly spaced across our daily wake period. These four-hour ultradian rhythms are activated by dopamine, a key chemical substance in the brain. When dopamine levels are out of kilter - as is suggested to be the case with people suffering from bipolar disease and schizophrenia - the four-hour rhythms can stretch as long as 48 hours. With this study, conducted on genetically modified mice, Dr. Storch and his team demonstrate that sleep abnormalities, which in the past have been associated with circadian rhythm disruption, result instead from an imbalance of an ultradian rhythm generator (oscillator) that is based on dopamine. The team's findings also offer a very specific explanation for the two-day cycling between mania and depression observed in certain bipolar cases: it is a result of the dopamine oscillator running on a 48-hour cycle. This work is groundbreaking not only because of its discovery of a novel dopamine-based rhythm generator, but also because of its links to psychopathology. This new data suggests that when the ultradian arousal oscillator goes awry, sleep becomes disturbed and mania will be induced in bipolar patients; oscillator imbalance may likely also be associated with schizophrenic episodes in schizophrenic subjects. The findings have potentially strong implications for the treatment of bipolar disease and other mental illnesses linked to dopamine dysregulation.

Mindfulness meditation practices resulted in improved sleep quality for older adults with moderate sleep disturbance in a clinical trial comparing meditation to a more structured program focusing on changing poor sleep habits and establishing a bedtime routine

Sleep disturbances are a medical and public health concern for our nation's aging population. An estimated 50% of individuals 55 years and older have some sort of sleep problem. Moderate sleep disturbances in older adults are associated with higher levels of fatigue, disturbed mood, such as depressive symptoms, and a reduced quality of life. David S. Black, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and colleagues conducted a small clinical trial in Los Angeles in 2012 and their analysis included 49 individuals (average age 66). The trial included 24 individuals who took part in a standardized mindful awareness practices (MAPs) intervention and 25 individuals who participated in a sleep hygiene education (SHE) intervention. Differences between the groups were measured using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), a widely used self-reported questionnaire of sleep disturbances. Participants in the MAPs group showed improvement relative to those in the SHE group. The MAPs group had average PSQI scores of 10.2 at baseline and 7.4 after the intervention. The SHE group had average PSQIs of 10.2 at baseline and 9.1 after the intervention. The MAPs group also showed improvement relative to the SHE group on secondary measures of insomnia symptoms, depression symptoms, fatigue interference and fatigue severity. However, differences between the groups were not seen for anxiety, stress or inflammatory signaling, a measure of which declined in both groups over time. Mindfulness meditation appears to have a role in addressing the prevalent burden of sleep problems among older adults by remediating their moderate sleep disturbances and deficits in daytime functioning, with short-term effect sizes commensurate with the status quo of clinical treatment approaches for sleep problems.

Building on their earlier work that suggested people who meditate have less age-related atrophy in the brain's white matter, a new study by UCLA researchers found that meditation appeared to help preserve the brain's gray matter, the tissue that contains neurons

The scientists looked specifically at the association between age and gray matter. They compared 50 people who had mediated for years and 50 who didn't. People in both groups showed a loss of gray matter as they aged. But the researchers found among those who meditated, the volume of gray matter did not decline as much as it did among those who didn't. Dr. Florian Kurth, a co-author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, said the researchers were surprised by the magnitude of the difference. "We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating," he said. "Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain." As baby boomers have aged and the elderly population has grown, the incidence of cognitive decline and dementia has increased substantially as the brain ages. "In that light, it seems essential that longer life expectancies do not come at the cost of a reduced quality of life," said Dr. Eileen Luders, first author and assistant professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "While much research has focused on identifying factors that increase the risk of mental illness and neurodegenerative decline, relatively less attention has been turned to approaches aimed at enhancing cerebral health." Each group in the study was made up of 28 men and 22 women ranging in age from 24 to 77. Those who meditated had been doing so for four to 46 years, with an average of 20 years. The participants' brains were scanned using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging. Although the researchers found a negative correlation between gray matter and age in both groups of people - suggesting a loss of brain tissue with increasing age - they also found that large parts of the gray matter in the brains of those who meditated seemed to be better preserved, Kurth said.

People who have upbeat outlooks on life have significantly better cardiovascular health, suggests a new study that examined associations between optimism and heart health in more than 5,100 adults

"Individuals with the highest levels of optimism have twice the odds of being in ideal cardiovascular health compared to their more pessimistic counterparts," said lead author Rosalba Hernandez, a professor of social work at the University of Illinois. "This association remains significant, even after adjusting for socio-demographic characteristics and poor mental health." Participants' cardiovascular health was assessed using seven metrics: blood pressure, body mass index, fasting plasma glucose and serum cholesterol levels, dietary intake, physical activity and tobacco use - the same metrics used by the American Heart Association to define heart health and being targeted by the AHA in its Life's Simple 7 public awareness campaign. In accordance with AHA's heart-health criteria, the researchers allocated 0, 1 or 2 points - representing poor, intermediate and ideal scores, respectively - to participants on each of the seven health metrics, which were then summed to arrive at a total cardiovascular health score. Participants' total health scores ranged from 0 to 14, with a higher total score indicative of better health. The participants, who ranged in age from 45-84, also completed surveys that assessed their mental health, levels of optimism, and physical health, based upon self-reported extant medical diagnoses of arthritis, liver and kidney disease. Individuals' total health scores increased in tandem with their levels of optimism. People who were the most optimistic were 50% and 76% more likely to have total health scores in the intermediate or ideal ranges, respectively. The association between optimism and cardiovascular health was even stronger when socio-demographic characteristics such as age, race and ethnicity, income and education status were factored in. People who were the most optimistic were twice as likely to have ideal cardiovascular health, and 55% more likely to have a total health score in the intermediate range, the researchers found. Optimists had significantly better blood sugar and total cholesterol levels than their counterparts. They also were more physically active, had healthier body mass indexes and were less likely to smoke. The findings may be of clinical significance, given that a 2013 study indicated that a one-point increase in an individual's total-health score on the LS7 was associated with an 8% reduction in their risk of stroke, Hernandez said. "At the population level, even this moderate difference in cardiovascular health translates into a significant reduction in death rates," Hernandez said. "This evidence, which is hypothesized to occur through a biobehavioral mechanism, suggests that prevention strategies that target modification of psychological well-being - e.g., optimism - may be a potential avenue for AHA to reach its goal of improving Americans' cardiovascular health by 20% before 2020." Believed to be the first study to examine the association of optimism and cardiovascular health in a large, ethnically and racially diverse population, the sample for the current study was 38% white, 28% African-American, 22% Hispanic/Latino and 12% Chinese.