A new study has revealed that just one session of hot yoga a week could help to relieve symptoms of depression and boost your mental health
The hot yoga trial was carried out by doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in the USA. The adults taking part had moderate to severe depression.
They found that their symptoms of depression greatly reduced after taking part in heated yoga sessions.
For eight weeks, they practised 90 minutes of Bikram yoga in a 105°F room.
They were prescribed at least two yoga classes per week, but overall attended an average of 10.3 classes over eight weeks.
After the two-month trial, the yoga students had significantly reduced depressive symptoms compared to their study counterparts waiting to take part.
They were assessed through what's known as the clinician-rated Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (IDS-CR) scale.
Forty-four per cent achieved such low IDS-CR scores that their depression was considered to be in remission, compared with 6.3% on the waitlist.
Depressive symptoms were reduced even in those who did only half of the prescribed yoga "dose".
This suggests that doing hot yoga even just once a week could help reduce depression.
Hot yoga on prescription?
"Yoga and heat-based interventions could potentially change the course for treatment for patients with depression," says Maren Nyer, PhD, Yoga Studies director at MGH.
"It could provide a non-medication–based approach with additional physical benefits as a bonus.
"We are currently developing new studies to determine the specific contributions of each element—heat and yoga—to the clinical effects we have observed in depression."
"Future research is needed to compare heated to non-heated yoga for depression to explore whether heat has benefits over and above that of yoga for the treatment of depression," says research director David Mischoulon, MD, PhD.
"This is especially important given the promising evidence for whole body hyperthermia as a treatment for major depressive disorder."
Yoga is also thought to alleviate some of the symptoms associated with menopause.
No comments:
Post a Comment