Mindfulness and medication work equally well to curb anxiety, a new study has found

Advertisement

Mindfulness and medication work equally well to curb anxiety, a new study has found



CNN

A mindfulness meditation class may be as effective as a traditional medication at reducing anxiety, according to a new study.

The study, published Nov. 9 in JAMA Psychiatry, involved a group of 276 adults with untreated anxiety disorders. Half of the patients were randomly selected to take 10 to 20 mg of escitalopram, the generic form of Lexapro, a common drug used to treat anxiety and depression. The other half was allocated to an eight-week course in mindfulness-based stress reduction.

The results were amazing: both groups experienced a roughly 20% reduction in their anxiety symptoms over the eight-week period.

Elizabeth Hoge, the study’s lead author and director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Program at Georgetown University Medical Center, told CNN she hopes the research can open up more treatment options for patients with anxiety.

“Lexapro is a great drug; I prescribe it a lot,” she said. “But it’s not for everyone.”

Meditation could be prescribed in place of medication for patients who, for example, are experiencing severe side effects or have allergies to anti-anxiety drugs, Hoge says. And starting meditation could also be a first step for people who have untreated anxiety and are suspicious of medication.

But the research shouldn’t be a trigger for patients to stop their medication without consulting a doctor. “If someone is already taking medication, they can meditate at the same time,” Hoge said. “If you want to stop taking the medication, you should talk to your doctor.”

There may be undetermined factors that make some patients respond better to meditation. Hoge says that after the data collection was complete, participants were given the opportunity to try the treatment option they had not been assigned. Some patients assigned to the meditation group found that the drug was actually much more effective for them, and vice versa, according to Hoge.

Hoge says further research could look at “what are the predictors of response to the different treatments,” and look at which patients benefit more from meditation than medication. Then clinicians could prescribe different treatment regimens based on their patient profiles.

And she hopes the research leads to more insurance companies covering meditation classes as an anxiety treatment.

“Typically, insurance companies are willing to pay for something if there’s research supporting its use,” she said. “If they know it’s just as effective as the drug they’re paying for, why aren’t they paying for it?”

Patients assigned to the meditation group were asked to personally attend a mindfulness meditation group class once a week. Each class lasted approximately two and a half hours and was held at a local clinic. They were also asked to meditate alone for about 40 minutes a day.

Hoge likened the time commitment to “taking a physical education or art class.”

But according to Joseph Arpaia, an Oregon-based psychiatrist who specializes in mindfulness and meditation, the daily commitment is probably too much for many anxiety sufferers.

“Telling people who are so overworked to meditate for 45 minutes a day is the ‘let them eat cake’ of psychotherapy,” he wrote in a response to Hoge’s paper, also published in JAMA Psychiatry.

Arpaia says he’s been working to find less time-consuming mindfulness methods to help patients manage their anxiety. One technique he teaches is called “One Breath Reset,” which helps patients calm down in the course of a single breath.

But despite his reservations, “It’s always interesting to see how meditation works, and it works just as well as medication,” he said. “My hope would be that people realize that there are things other than drugs that can work.”

“My other hope would be that they realize that when you sit and follow your breath, it’s great when you feel relaxed, but it doesn’t relax everyone. Find something that works. Read a book, go for a walk, spend time gardening,” he said.

Patients assigned to the meditation group participated in a specific program called mindfulness-based stress reduction, first developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the 1970s. The program is secular but based on some Buddhist teachings.

“It’s like a skill that you practice,” Hoge said. “People learn to have a different relationship with their thoughts. In practice, we train people to just let go of the thoughts, to be patient and gentle with the thoughts, to just let them pass.”

The “practice of doing this over and over again allows people to put a little distance between themselves and their thoughts,” she said.

Patients shouldn’t expect meditation — or medication — to completely eliminate their anxiety, Hoge said. “It’s normal to be scared,” she said. “But we can take it a little easier.”

“People think meditation is hard, that you have to keep your mind clear of thoughts,” she said. “That is not the case. You are still meditating even when you have thoughts. Only the intention to meditate counts.”

And Arpaia says meditation can help break the feedback loops that foster anxiety.

“Anxiety tends to be something that feeds on itself,” he said. “What happens is that a person becomes anxious, which affects their cognitive and social skills. If the person feels increasingly compromised, that builds anxiety.”

Anxiety isn’t the only challenge that meditation could help patients overcome.

A 2011 study published in the American Journal of Nursing found that an eight-week mindfulness program was as effective as antidepressants in preventing depression from recurring.

Hoge said various meditation programs could be useful for treating depression and ADHD, among other things.

“I think that’s promising,” she said.

You May Also Like