It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Expert commentary in leading cardiology journal suggests Transcendental Meditation reduces stress-related cardiovascular risk
Psychosocial stress is a major contributor to hypertension and cardiovascular disease, according to a new commentary published in Nature Reviews Cardiology. The article reviews decades of scientific evidence showing how chronic stress affects cardiovascular biology and examines research on the Transcendental Meditation technique as a potential strategy for reducing stress-related cardiovascular risk.
The commentary was authored by Robert H. Schneider, MD, FACC, of Maharishi International University; Keith C. Norris, MD, PhD, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; and Robert D. Brook, MD, of Wayne State University School of Medicine.
Large international studies have shown that psychosocial stress substantially increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke. Stress contributes to disease through several biological pathways, including activation of the sympathetic nervous system, dysregulation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, inflammation, and endothelial dysfunction. These mechanisms accelerate vascular aging and contribute to hypertension and cardiometabolic disease.
“Psychosocial stress is a powerful and modifiable contributor to cardiovascular disease,” said Schneider, lead author of the commentary and director of the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi International University. “Addressing stress may represent an important opportunity to improve cardiovascular prevention.”
Meditation and cardiovascular physiology
The commentary reviews research suggesting that the Transcendental Meditation technique produces a physiological state often described as “restful alertness,” characterized by reduced sympathetic nervous system activity and increased parasympathetic tone. These changes reflect improved autonomic regulation and reduced activation of stress-response pathways. Neuroimaging studies have also reported changes in brain networks involved in stress regulation and emotional resilience.
“These findings suggest that stress-reduction approaches may influence biological pathways involved in hypertension and cardiovascular disease,” said Norris, professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Evidence from clinical studies
More than three decades of clinical research—including randomized controlled trials—have examined the cardiovascular effects of Transcendental Meditation. Studies cited in the commentary report reductions in blood pressure, improvements in metabolic risk factors, and slower progression of atherosclerosis. Some trials have also reported reductions in major cardiovascular events among individuals practicing the technique.
Recognition of psychosocial stress as a cardiovascular risk factor is increasingly reflected in clinical practice guidelines. The 2025 American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology hypertension guideline includes stress reduction—including Transcendental Meditation—among recommended lifestyle approaches for managing blood pressure. The authors conclude that addressing psychosocial stress more systematically could contribute to reductions in hypertension and cardiovascular risk and support more comprehensive approaches to cardiovascular prevention.
Transcendental Meditation to combat psychosocial stress, hypertension and cardiovascular disease
Screening and preventive treatment program reduced tuberculosis incidence 83% among Tibetan children living in northern India
Study conducted partially with federal funds shows a comprehensive effort can achieve rapid and sustained reduction of disease transmission and impact in high TB burden areas using existing control measures
A partially federally funded study shows a comprehensive tuberculosis (TB) screening and preventive treatment program can significantly reduce the disease’s transmission and impact among schoolchildren in high-burden areas. In this photo, a Mongolian child is being screened for TB as part of the Johns Hopkins Medicine-led Zero TB in Kids program. Credit: Kunchok Dorjee, M.D., Ph.D.
A recently released prospective analysis of the first eight years of the Johns Hopkins Medicine-led Zero TB in Kids program shows that significant reduction of tuberculosis (TB) transmission and burden (the total impact of health problems — specifically death, morbidity and disability — on a population) among schoolchildren in high-burden areas can be achieved using existing TB screening, treatment and follow-up protocols.
Since 2017, Zero TB in Kids, a comprehensive TB screening and tuberculosis preventive treatment (TPT) program, has been implemented in settings in northern India — such as schools, monasteries and nunneries — where Tibetan refugee schoolchildren congregate.
“To evaluate the effectiveness of the first eight years of our effort, we searched for studies published between January 2000 and December 2025 to compare the results of other TB screening and treatment programs with Zero TB in Kids,” says Kunchok Dorjee, M.D., Ph.D., project director and principal investigator of Zero TB in Kids and assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “To our surprise, we could not identify any study published in that period that demonstrated meaningful reduction of TB on a population level, indicating that there are significant gaps in promoting the knowledge and experience needed to make large-scale TB screening and TPT programs work.”
Between 2017 and 2024, comprehensive and longitudinal TB screening and TPT programs were conducted by Zero TB in Kids in congregate settings of the Tibetan communities in northern India. The effort worked exceptionally well, says Dorjee.
“Over the eight-year period, screening and TPT led to an 83% reduction in TB incidence and a 32% reduction in the prevalence of latent TB infection among children, in spite of setbacks arising as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” he says. “And after one round of screening and TPT, the occurrence of new TB infections declined by 59% in the child population.”
“The prevalence of TB disease also declined substantially in participants who did not receive TPT, indicating an overall deduction of TB transmission in the population,” adds Dorjee. “In comparison, the annual reduction of global TB rates is around 2%.”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), incidence measures the number of new cases of a disease that appear in a specific population over a defined period, and therefore, represents disease risk. Prevalence, says WHO, measures the total number of individuals in a population, both new and existing cases, who have a disease at a specific point in time. Prevalence defines the burden of a disease.
A latent TB infection occurs when a person acquires the TB pathogen — the bacterium known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis — but does not have symptoms and is not infectious at that time, but could become active and infectious in the future.
Dorjee says the COVID-19 pandemic lead to a resurgence of TB conversions (people developing a positive TB skin test who were previously negative) and TB disease among the schoolchildren followed, but declines returned once screening and TPT resumed in 2024.
Participants with seizures and hepatitis B, Dorjee adds, were less likely to receive TPT during the study period. He says the researchers believe this occurred because of physicians being uncertain or lacking confidence in TPT for these groups, or fearing liver toxicity or drug interactions if the treatment was administered.
Dorjee says that the success of the Zero TB in Kids program, which emphasizes community-led screening and TPT, shows that rapid and sustained reduction of TB transmission and TB impact in high TB burden areas is possible with optimized use of existing medications, tools and protocols for TB control.
“Based on these findings, we recommend three things,” says Dorjee. “First, a shift in the approach of global TB control must be made to emphasize surveillance of TB infections and TPT implementation; second, mass screenings and TPT should be conducted across schools and other congregate settings in high TB burden areas to bend the TB epidemic curve toward elimination in children and adolescents; and third, guidelines are needed to implement TPT in people with comorbidities, such as hepatitis B and seizures, for improved uptake and acceptance of TPT.”
Along with Dorjee, the members of the research team from Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are Sheriza Baksh, Robert Bollinger, Richard Chaisson, Sangyal Dorjee, Jonathan Golub, Amita Gupta, Rachel Sadoff and Sourya Shrestha.
Team members from other institutions are Tenzin Dechen, Tenzin Dolker, Ugen Gyatso, Jiqme Kalsang, Tenzin Kalsang, Tenzin Khachoe, Dekyi Lhadon, Tenzin Namdon, Tsetan Dorji Sadutshang, Tenzin Tsomo, Tenzin Thinley, Sonem Topgyal, Tenzin Yangkyi from the Delek Hospital and the Central Tibetan Administration (India); Ravinder Kumar and Rajesh Sood from the National TB Elimination Program, National Health Mission (India); Vidya Mave from the Centre for Infectious Diseases in India, Johns Hopkins Medicine (India); Lobsang Tsering from the Department of Health, Central Tibetan Administration (India); and Zorba Paster from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Federal funding for the study came from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grant K01-AI148583. Additional funding was provided by the NIAID-Johns Hopkins Center for AIDS Research and private donations, foundations and philanthropies.
None of the authors have any conflict of interest disclosures to report.
A new study shows that contributions from both highly and casually active citizen scientists can be equally valuable and — in some cases — even complement each other.
The word “nemotia”1 is a neologism, a newly coined term that, in this case, describes the sense of overwhelm and disconnect accompanying the thought that nothing you do will ever make a difference. If this describes your current frame of mind, you might find some comfort in a recent discovery made by researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
It has to do with citizen science, a sort of reciprocal partnership in which large numbers of non-scientists collect data that is used across multiple disciplines, from environmental monitoring and conservation assessments to public health works and city planning. Those who collect data benefit by engaging with and learning more about the natural world, and scientists have the obvious benefit of acquiring the information needed to do their job.
Many citizen scientists are passionate about the work they do. But, as with most other volunteer opportunites, those who are able to participate the most tend to have an ample reserve of time, money and expertise. Volunteers who lack these resources generally participate less.
But a new study shows that contributions from both groups can be equally valuable and — in some cases — even complement each other. The results are based on millions of observations uploaded to iNaturalist, an online, community based platform where users can help each other identify species, keep track of what they’ve found, participate in competitions and organize local survey — or bioblitz — events.
The lead author, Erin Grady, undertook the study while pursuing a master’s degree at the Florida Museum. She’s now the engagement coordinator for the USA National Phenology Network, an organization that mobilizes volunteers to document the cyclical ways in which plants and animals change from one season to the next.
“There’s often this idea that we want everyone to be as highly active as possible and collect the most amount of data. We tend to focus on super-users,” Grady said. “Something I got out of our results is maybe we shouldn’t be striving for just that. Every type of observation and way of observing counts, which sounds cheesy, but it’s true.”
Grady became interested in the subject after experiencing her own bout of nemotia. Though she originally intended to study the timing of plant life cycle events and their relationship to environmental variables in graduate school, the ideas she started out with ultimately left her feeling disconnected.
After searching for something she was passionate about, she “fell into this contributary science space, which was the perfect intersection between impactful biodiversity research, community and how people interact with the environment.”
Grady wanted to know whether there were any substantial differences between the type of data that casual and highly active iNaturalist users collect. To find out, she selected a large area in the Southeast United States and downloaded all observations made there since iNaturalist was founded in 2008. This gave her 7.5 million observations taken by roughly 283,000 users. She then organized the observations based on the type of environment they came from, which included categories like protected parks, urban areas and agricultural zones.
iNaturalist observations do not include personal data about the people who made them. So, to get at the socioeconomic side of things, Grady also classified observations based on whether they were made in high- or low-income areas. They split users into travelers and residents based on the proportion of observations they made in the study region compared with those they made elsewhere.
Then they ran the numbers.
“The big picture here is that highly active users are seeking out regions that are biodiversity rich, so they’re more likely than casual users to be observing in natural green spaces or on protected land,” Grady said. “Casual users are more likely to make observations during their daily life, so within urban areas and neighborhoods.”
The tendency for people to observe in a particular type of area results in lopsided, or biased, data that scientists have to account for when conducting their analyses. As a rule, green spaces and protected areas support more biodiversity than urban areas, but it’s hard to know the extent to which this is true when they are sampled unevenly.
This study shows that the bias toward natural areas perpetuated by super users is partly balanced by those of casual users.
“We see in the results that you can push back on those biases a little when you’re walking your dog or even in your backyard, because we have fewer observations for neighborhoods.”
Senior author Rob Guralnick, the curator of biodiversity informatics at the Florida Museum, has published multiple studies on the effect development has on biodiversity using iNaturalist data. He emphasized the need for balancing out user biases.
“The place where we’re going to discover the most about the total, global impact of urbanization on animals and plants is through things like iNaturalist, because if we want to learn about how increasing impermeable surfaces or hydrological disruptions or urban heat and light affect living systems, we need replicated data across hundreds of cities. Citizen science is a global phenomena, and more and more people are getting involved,” he said.
Observations can be powerful in other ways as well, Grady explained. Low-income areas are often underrepresented in iNaturalist and on other citizen science platforms. This has implications for how much scientists know about biodiversity in those areas. It also affects the potential for positive change.
“One of the great things about citizen science is that communities can collect data and use it to advocate for themselves.”
But if you were to ask Grady or Guralnick about the single most important aspect of citizen science, they’d tell you it’s something that transcends data altogether. It’s the same thing that cured Grady’s nemotia.
“There’s a real change, I think, within people when they start observing. They feel more empowered, fulfilled, connected – and not just connected with the natural world but connected with this global community of people who care about similar things.”
Guralnick agreed. “There are so many things we have no agency to do anything about. But one thing we do have some control over every day is to observe, to see the world and to report it and to understand what it tells us about where we are and what we’re doing and how we’re living, to focus on things that bring joy, happiness and beauty to the world around us. Just observing the natural world is important. I think that’s an idea that’s going to come up a lot in the next decade.”
The study was published in the journal Citizen Science: Theory and Practice.
Additional co-authors of the study are Caitlin Campbell of Bat Conservation International and Corey Callaghan of the University of Florida.
The study was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (grant no. DBI-2223512) and supported by the intramural research program of the United States Department of Agriculture (FLA-FTL-006297).
Footnotes:
1. Pronounced nih-moh-shah, from “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”.
IDE Technologies, a world leader in desalination and advanced water treatment solutions, and Rice University’s Water Technologies Entrepreneurship and Research (WaTER) Institute, a multidisciplinary center advancing innovative water treatment technologies, energy transitions and resilient infrastructure, are proud to announce their strategic collaboration.
This partnership brings together IDE’s international and long-standing proven expertise in commercial water treatment and the WaTER Institute’s pioneering water research. The two organizations will leverage their complementary strengths to conduct joint research, share technical know-how and drive the development and commercialization of transformative water solutions in areas such as desalination, brine management, PFAS treatment and destruction and resource recovery.
“Uniting IDE’s global expertise and R&D capabilities in advanced water technologies and the Rice University WaTER Institute’s renowned academic and research prowess, this alliance is poised to deliver groundbreaking, pioneering and holistic water treatment solutions” said Tomer Efrat, chief technical officer at IDE. “These desalination and water treatment solutions address the evolving demands of modern industry and the complexities of environmental stewardship, championing a resilient and sustainable future for communities worldwide.”
Through collaborative efforts in techno-economic assessment, laboratory analysis, industry approvals, manufacturing and market research, IDE and the WaTER Institute aim to accelerate the development and adoption of next-generation technologies.
“We look forward to collaborating with IDE to learn from their successful deployment of market-leading desalination systems,” said Eric Willman, executive director of the WaTER Institute. “At the WaTER Institute we value partnerships with industrial leaders like IDE to ensure we are working on the most impactful problems to solve.”
The initial phase of this collaboration focuses on advancing IDE’s flagship wastewater treatment solutions, including the Max H2O Desalter and PFRO, with supplementary research from the WaTER Institute. Areas of targeted innovation include novel desalination and brine management processes such as LSRRO, breakthrough PFAS treatment and destruction technologies and resource recovery technologies for critical materials from brine.
“This collaboration strengthens IDE’s long-standing commitment to the Texas water community,” said Rosemary Niechcial, CEO of IDE Water Solutions North America. “By partnering with a leading academic institution like Rice University, we’re not only advancing research and innovation but also deepening our engagement with local industries, utilities and communities that are shaping the region’s sustainable water future.”
“Water scarcity, contamination and climate resilience are global challenges that demand bold solutions,” said Pedro J.J. Alvarez, director of the WaTER Institute. “Partnering with IDE allows us to move breakthrough ideas out of the lab and into real-world deployment faster, combining our research strengths with their proven engineering and operational expertise. Together, we aim to deliver scalable technologies that change the way the world treats, recovers and values water.”
Key elements of the partnership include establishing an IDE test bed system within the WaTER Institute to enable integration and testing of the institute’s developed systems, research-quality data generation and engagement for students and IDE partners.
“We are excited to collaborate with IDE Technologies, a global leader in membrane-based desalination and water treatment,” said Menachem Elimelech, who leads the Rice Center for Membrane Excellence. “At the Rice Center for Membrane Excellence, our faculty are working at the forefront of fundamental and applied research in membrane-based technologies for desalination, water reuse and resource recovery. This partnership allows us to combine academic innovation with IDE’s real-world expertise, accelerating the development of impactful technologies that address pressing global water challenges.”
The alliance will further create exchange opportunities, including placements for Rice students, doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers at IDE facilities across the United States, as well as internships or sabbaticals for IDE professionals at the WaTER Institute in collaboration with its faculty.
The partnership will also facilitate IDE to participate in the ARC Innovation district to support the Water Technology Accelerator initiative, while both organizations will jointly pursue grant submissions aligned with their shared mission in view of the partnership.
By combining IDE’s global reach and innovative engineering with the WaTER Institute’s academic excellence and research capabilities, this partnership will deliver creative and comprehensive water treatment solutions that meet today’s industrial demands and environmental challenges, supporting a sustainable future for communities worldwide.
