UPFRONT

Meditation breaks opioid addiction spiral

Mindfulness meditation—a passive awareness of the body and its surroundings—can help people overcome their addiction to opioids, the powerful painkillers.

After eight weeks of meditating, people lost their need for opioids, felt less pain and regained their joy for nature and family, a shift that was recorded by EEG (electroencephalogram), which monitors brain patterns.

With opioid addiction killing around a hundred Americans a day, researchers from the University of Utah say mindfulness meditation is a proven and safe way to break the addictive cycle.

A type of mindfulness practice, which the researchers call MORE (Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement), has been tested on 135 people who had been taking opioids for chronic pain.

During the two-month study, the participants either meditated or took part in a therapist-led support group. Their brain function was recorded with EEG before and after the trial.

The meditation “reversed the devastating trajectory” of opioid use, which blunts positive feelings and requires users to take ever higher doses of the drug in order to function, the researchers said.

Meditators reported feeling greater joy for simple things, less pain and greater positive psychological health.

Around a quarter of people who are prescribed opioids become addicted to them; the drugs were responsible for 63 percent of all overdose deaths in 2015.

Sci Adv, 2019; 5: eaax1569

Talking works as well as drugs for major depression

People suffering from major depression fare just as well by talking about the problem as taking a powerful antidepressant.

After five years, people who used cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—the ‘talking therapy’—were coping as well as those who instead had opted to take antidepressants.

The drugs are certainly a cheaper option, at least initially. But when the costs of changing medications, side-effects or having a relapse are factored in, there’s hardly any difference between the two, say researchers from the University of Michigan.

Looking at the outcomes of the two groups, the researchers say that people who had CBT saw their symptoms improve just as much as those taking antidepressants—and a survey discovered that most people with depression would prefer to be treated with CBT or some other nondrug approach.

The problem is that only a quarter of them ever have the chance. The costs of starting CBT are higher, and there aren’t enough therapists on the ground to treat people.

But if insurers could see that, in the long run, there wasn’t much difference in costs and outcomes between the two approaches, perhaps more funding could be made available to the talking therapies, the researchers add.

Ann Int Med, 2019 Oct 29

Avocado as good as statins for lowering cholesterol

Forget statins, eating an avocado a day can keep ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol in check. After five weeks, levels will be significantly lower, researchers say. The diet has been tested on a group of 45 people who were overweight or obese, and who were also given a low-fat diet—but without avocado—to see if that worked any better on their cholesterol levels.

But after five weeks, it was the avocado that made the biggest impact on LDL cholesterol, and had caused levels to drop significantly, say researchers from Penn State University.

The fruit seemed to target LDL particles that had become oxidized—or exposed to oxygen—and these are the