Multidimensional Analysis of Twin Sets During an Intensive Week-Long Meditation Retreat: A Pilot Study

Meditation and other alternative practices have long been known to promote various health benefits, presumably by fostering a blood and tissue environment that enhances resilience to stress. Here, we used an integrated, multidisciplinary approach that couples quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG), biometrics, molecular, and biochemical data at multiple time points to investigate the impact of mind-based interventions on the body in a cohort of twins during an intensive week-long meditation retreat. We aim to show the feasibility of a novel design aimed to address individual changes controlling for intersubject trait variation (via twin control) and explore the role of genetic background on multi-omic factors during meditation. Interestingly, twin pairs showed significant spectral power correlations while in separate rooms and only one twin was meditating. These similarities were not observed in mismatched twin pairs. Heart rate dynamics assessments showed alignment among twin pairs that were absent between unmatched pairs. In addition, changes in gene expression, metabolites, and cytokines in blood plasma associated with specific meditative states showed patterns of change related to time points. Twin sets were similar in multiple domains before the start of the retreat, showed considerable divergence at the mid-point, and looked more similar by the end of the retreat. To our knowledge, this study is novel within the twin research paradigm and is a first step toward exploring the effects of meditation in twins.