Study in Cognitively Intact Seniors Aiming to Assess the Effects of Meditation Training

Eligibility criteria

1. Inclusion Criteria :
   For all participants
   * Age ≥ 65 years ;
   * To be autonomous
   * Live in their home;
   * Educational level ≥ 7 years (from the Preparatory Course (First grade) included);
   * To be registered to the social security system ;
   * To be motivated to effectively participate in the project and to sign the consent form in agreement with the local ethic committee ;
   * Neuropsychological performances within the normal range (according to age, sex, and educational level), as assessed by the diagnostic battery.
   For participants without previous meditation practice
   * French mother tongue;
   * Available for the trial duration (24 months);
   * Retired since 1 year or more;
   * No preference regarding the intervention group ;
   * Not having regularly or intensively practiced meditation or comparable practices (yoga, Qi Gong, Alexander technique) as follows :
     * more than one day per week for more than six months consecutively over the last 10 years,
     * intensively (internship or retreat > five consecutive days) over the past 10 years,
     * more than 25 days of retreats (cumulatively) prior to the last 10 years ;
   * Not speaking English fluently.
   For expert meditators :
   * Formal meditation practice > 10 000 hours in the whole life, including at least 6 cumulated months of retreat;
   * Daily meditation practice (at least 6 days/week, 45 minutes/day);
   * Mindfulness meditation practice (i.e. mindfulness, samatha/vipassana, zazen (zen), shikantaza (zen), focused attention, mahamudra/Dzogchen, and compassion/loving jindness (tonglen, metta/karuna, bodhichitta)
2. Exclusion criteria :
   * Contraindication to MRI or PET Amyvid® ;
   * For security reasons realted with the use of Amyvid®, a blood sampling allowing to measure hepatic and renal functions will be performed at the V1 visit before the PET-Amyvid® scan. In case anomalies are detected of grade 3 or higher severity, the PET-Amyvid® scan will not be performed.
   * Hypersensitivity to Amyvid®
   * History or presence of a major neurological or psychiatric disorder (including an addiction to alcohol or drugs);
   * History of cerebral disease (vascular, degenerative, physical malformation, tumor, or head trauma with loss of consciousness for more than an hour);
   * Presence of a chronic disease or acute unstable illness (respiratory, cardiovascular, digestive, renal, metabolic, hematologic, endocrine or infectious);
   * Current or recent medication that may interfere with cognitive action or radiological measures (psychotropic drugs, antihistamines, anti-Parkinsonian drugs, benzodiazepines, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents, antiepileptics, central analgesic and muscle relaxants);
   * Under legal guardianship or incapacitation;
   * Inclusion in another biomedical research protocol at baseline, if including use of a radiolabel for radiological measures;
   * Physical of behavioural inhabilities to perform the follow-up visits as planned in the study protocol.

The sponsor's own eligibility wording, lightly reformatted. The study team makes the final eligibility decision — worth discussing with your doctor.

Eligibility criteria as of 2025-02-10