Meditation combined with aerobic exercise reduces stress in medical students.

reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.May 4, 2020

Rutgers Medical School student Robert Wood Johnson, Paul Lavadera, hoped his career would put him in the forefront of medical emergencies.

But you never could have imagined that you would graduate during the world’s largest pandemic in a century when you joined forces two years ago with Tracey Shors, a distinguished professor of neuroscience and psychology, in a study to find out if aerobic exercise and meditation would reduce stress and improve the quality of life of medical students like him.

Now Lavadera, who begins a four-year emergency medicine residency on June 29 at a single COVID-19 hospital in Brooklyn and Shors, who she believes may have fought a case of the coronavirus, is using the stress reduction technique. that RWJMS Medical was taught. School students to help them deal with the anxiety and uncertainty that remain in the path of crisis.

“I am isolating myself alone in my department and keeping up to date with evolving treatment guidelines and recommendations regarding COVID19, but I am making a conscious decision to avoid sensational, minute-by-minute news,” says Lavadera, who will split his time between two Brooklyn hospitals: Kings County Hospital in Flatbush and SUNY Downstate Medical Center, one of only three hospitals in New York that cares for patients with COVID-19 only. “I am training, mediating and doing the training program that helped promote medical students. I think it keeps me afloat and helps me keep my stress level low.”

Rutgers’ new study in the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Journal, Lavadera, co-author of Shors and doctoral student Emma Millon, documents the effectiveness of the technique that helped them both through this difficult time. The researchers found that meditation combined with aerobic exercise reduces stress and rumination while improving the quality of life for medical students.

For an eight-week period, freshmen and sophomores participated in the MAP Train My Brain ™ intervention twice a week, which included 30 minutes of meditation followed by 30 minutes of aerobic exercise compared to a group of student control that also did not.

Shors, who developed MAP (mental and physical) training for people with depression, trauma, and stress-related symptoms, has studied the effects of this training on different groups, including women who have been sexually assaulted and, more recently, women living with HIV, A study that has not yet been published.

When Shors began the study on medical students with Lavadera, he thought he understood how stressful it could be for doctors to treat patients. But he gained deeper insight during his recent illness.

For about six weeks from late February to early April, Shors suffered symptoms of coronavirus at home: shortness of breath, persistent cough, and debilitating fatigue. She went to the emergency department twice, received a chest x-ray that showed no pneumonia, and was sent home to isolate herself without a COVID-19 test because she had no fever.

Shors remembers the doctors and nurses.

Behind their masks, I could see the stress and anxiety in their eyes, but I also experienced the professionalism and compassion they bring to each person who comes seeking help. “

Tracey Shors, Vice President / Director of Graduate Studies in the Psychology Department of the Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers University-New Brunswick College of Arts and Sciences

The study, which the researchers believe is the first to document positive results with such an intervention in medical students, found that students doing MAP training experienced significantly less stress and were approximately 20 percent less likely to reflect on depressive and melancholic thoughts. to medical students in the control group who did not participate in the program.

Most importantly, the researchers say, those who participated in the study said the training improved their quality of life, and 84 percent of medical students said they would recommend MAP Train My BrainTM to future patients as a way to relieve anxiety and stress. and improve overall health.

Shors and Lavadera say that while the goal of the study was to provide a program for medical students that would keep them physically and mentally healthy, they also hoped it would be a program they wanted to recommend to future patients.

As the uncertainty of what lies ahead with the global pandemic of COVID-19 continues, both Shors, who at the height of what she believes to be her attack with the coronavirus, feared that it might have to be connected to a ventilator, and Lavadera, which has “This aerobic meditation and exercise program allows them to do it alone at home,” he said. This aerobic meditation and exercise program allows them to do it alone at home.

“It is always important to reduce stress, but especially important and difficult to do during this traumatic time,” says Shors. “We are living with the threat of disease and even death for ourselves and our loved ones. There is nothing more stressful than that.”