Brown receives $4.7M grant to study mindfulness

Brown received a $3.1 million grant from DARPA to develop a statistical analysis and visualization program this week
Brown received a $3.1 million grant from DARPA to develop a statistical analysis and visualization program this week

PROVIDENCE – A $4.7 million five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health will be used by Brown University researchers to study whether mindfulness can help patients follow treatment changes better.
According to a press release from the university, a common problem with treatments involving changes to diet and other lifestyle behaviors is that patients do not always follow them.
The grant will cover two phases of research. Researchers first will review data from dozens of mindfulness intervention studies, featuring approximately 2,000 participants, to see whether mindfulness interventions influenced patient self-regulation related to medical regimen adherence.
The second phase involves four random controlled trials assessing the impact of mindfulness interventions on measures of medical regimen adherence, including reducing blood pressure, and supporting dietary changes and weight loss.
Studies will take place at Brown, Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts.
“Based on the first phase of the grant where we merge many datasets, we will see which are the active components of mindfulness interventions in influencing self-regulation related to medical regimen adherence,” Eric Loucks, assistant professor of epidemiology in the Brown University School of Public Health and co-leader of the research, said in a statement. “From those findings, in the second phase of the grant we will customize ongoing randomized controlled mindfulness intervention trials to better engage with those self-regulation processes, with the goal of having a greater influence on health outcomes.”
Willoughby Britton, assistant professor (research) of psychiatry and human behavior in the Alpert Medical School, is the other principal investigator.
“This grant brings together fields that often operate in parallel without communicating with each other,” Britton said. “Clinical psychology, neuroscience, religious studies, cognitive science, epidemiology and psychiatry have a lot to offer each other but are rarely encouraged to work together.”

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