The Washington Post recently featured an article entitled “Meditation and yoga may ease your gut pain.” This article references a pilot study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital with patients having digestive issues. It notes that IBS/IBD (Irritable bowel syndrome/Irritable bowel disease) only have medications available that help relieve the symptoms yet don’t cure the underlying cause; whereas individuals that used the relaxation response—breathing with yoga and mediation actually saw a change in their gene expression over the 9 week intervention. The participants reported a reduction in their symptoms and due to the change in their DNA, specific genes that moderate inflammation, this may lead to improvement in their condition. This is a wonderful start and more clinical studies should be done that would include more patients and a control group.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0123861
