The centuries-old practice of Zen meditation might help reduce sensitivity to pain, say researchers in Montreal who compared pain responses in people trained in the technique and those who are not.

In the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, Joshua Grant, a doctoral student in physiology at the University of Montreal and his colleague Prof. Pierre Rainville looked at how or why meditation might influence pain perception.

Scientists recruited 13 Zen meditators with a minimum of 1,000 hours of practice to undergo a pain test. Their reactions were contrasted with 13 non-meditators.

Subjects included 10 women and 16 men between the ages of 22 and 56.

The study involved applying a heated plate to the calves of subjects intermittently and measuring at which temperatures the subject reported pain.

Most people felt moderate pain at 48 C, but meditators only started feeling pain at 50 C, the researchers found.

"Now that two degrees doesn't seem like a big difference, but it's actually a huge difference in terms of thermal pain," said Grant.

Zen meditators experienced an 18 per cent reduction in pain intensity, the researchers reported.

Dealing with pain

During meditation-like conditions, it appeared that meditators further reduced their pain partly by breathing more slowly: 12 breaths per minute versus an average of 15 breaths for non-meditators.

"The Zen practitioner senses pain but deals with it in a different way," said Myokyo, a monk and teacher of Zen meditation at the Abbess Centre Zen de la Main in Montreal.

It could be that slower breathing was linked to reduced pain by keeping the body in a relaxed state, Grant said.

"While previous studies have found that the emotional aspects of pain are influenced by meditation, we found that the sensation itself, as well as the emotional response, is different in meditators," he said.

Psychologist Ann Amsa teaches techniques such as visualization and breathing to help people with chronic pain.

Amsa said Zen meditation also works on the mind to lessen pain. Meditators observe good and bad sensations and then accept and release them so painful stimulation is felt less intensely, she said.

If meditation changes the way someone feels pain, then people would need to take less pain medication, Grant said.

The next phase of the research will involve MRI scans to learn how mediation affects brain activity.

The study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Mind and Life Institute Varela Grant, and the Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec.