P01.46. Assessment of autonomic tone at rest and during meditation in a longitudinal study of an eight-week meditation intervention

Abstract

Purpose Measures of heart rate variability (HRV) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), which are the healthy fluctua-tions in heart rate that reflect autonomic influences on cardiac activity, have been proposed as indicators of physical and psychological health. Previous studies sug-gest that HRV increases during some meditative states, but it is not clear how autonomic tone is affected either in the short term during meditative states, nor as a long-term result of meditation practice. Here we test two hypotheses: (1) eight weeks of meditation training will improve autonomic tone, in the form of increased overall HRV and decreased low-frequency HRV to high-frequency HRV (LF/HF) ratio; and (2) RSA increases during the meditation state compared to rest. Methods We collected electrocardiogram recordings as part of a larger randomized controlled trial of the effects of an eight-week meditation training intervention on healthy adults without prior meditation experience. Here we report data from eight subjects before and after the " mindful-attention " meditation intervention and the control intervention. The recordings were performed while the subjects were lying supine, at rest (for both groups) and in a meditative state (for the meditation group only). We computed measures of HRV and RSA across a 3-minute epoch using a point-process model of heart beat dynamics.