California: A new US research says physical yoga practices are as effective as other forms of regular exercise in helping patients suffering from chronic low back pain.
Based on smaller previous studies, researchers thought it was some combination of yoga’s stretching and its mental elements — deep breathing and relaxation — that improved back sufferers’ function. But the current study found that yoga worked no better than intensive stretching alone, suggesting that it’s the physical exercise, not the mindfulness component of yoga, that matters.
Yoga, he told Reuters Health, “seems to be a perfectly good option for people with back pain, but it is not a preferred option.”
For the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center, researchers looked at 228mentally healthy adults with chronic low back pain that didn’t have a specific cause such as a spinal disc problem.
Participants were randomly assigned to three groups. The first group took weekly 75-minute yoga classes while another group was assigned to weekly stretching and strength sessions. The last group which was considered as a control group received a book on coping with back pain.
The yoga and stretching groups in addition to their classes received instructional videos and were encouraged to practice at home for 20 minutes a day between classes.
After the 12-week program, people who had gone to the group classes reported significantly lower scores on a questionnaire measuring how much pain interferes with daily activities, compared to those given the book.
The questionnaire rated daily “disability” level on a scale of zero to 23, with 23 being the most severe. At the 12-week mark, the exercise groups had dropped from an initial average score of 10 in the yoga group or nine in the stretching group to between four and five in both groups.
The people who received the book started with an average score of nine and at 12 weeks had dropped to about a seven.
More participants who did either yoga or stretching also said that their back pain had diminished or was gone. Sixty percent of people in the yoga group reported improvements in pain, compared to 46 percent in the stretching classes and just 16 percent of people who only got the books.
Three months after the end of classes, symptom improvements were similar in people who had done either stretching or yoga, and still better than in the third, non-exercise group.
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