Yoga can reduce emotional distress, anxiety, fatigue, and insomnia in people living with cancer, according to the results of the first clinical trial of its kind.
Study Overview
Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are living with cancer, with advances in treatments meaning more patients are surviving the disease than ever before. However, many experience lasting physical and mental side-effects from their diagnosis and treatment. Up to 95% of cancer survivors suffer from sleep disturbances or insomnia, and more than half face mood disturbances, anxiety, or fatigue.
Clinical Trial Details
The first clinical trial of its kind has shown that regular gentle hatha and restorative yoga can help improve these side-effects without medication. Results were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting in Chicago. Researchers recruited 410 cancer survivors in the US who had not practiced yoga in the previous three months and whose cancer had not spread. The average age was 54, and three in four had breast cancer.
Participants were randomly assigned to standard survivorship care (204 individuals) or standard care plus the Yoga for Cancer Survivors (YOCAS) program (206 individuals). The four-week program included 18 gentle hatha and restorative yoga poses, breathing exercises, and mindfulness techniques. It consisted of two 75-minute instructor-led classes per week and at least 30 minutes of home practice weekly.
Results
Assessments using questionnaires showed that yoga participants experienced significantly less overall mood disturbance (moderate-to-large effect), less anxiety (small-to-medium effect), less fatigue (medium-to-large effect), and reduced insomnia compared to the control group. The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute.
Yuri Choi, lead author and research assistant professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center, stated: “There is no single gold standard behavioural treatment available to survivors for treating overall mood disturbance, anxiety, fatigue, and insomnia. By demonstrating that YOCAS intervention improves all four of these cancer-related side effects and showing how improvements in overall mood disturbance, anxiety, and fatigue influence yoga’s effect on insomnia, this trial helps to fill that gap.”
Dr Fumiko Chino, a cancer researcher and ASCO expert not involved in the trial, added: “This large, randomised study shows that structured yoga may help relieve some of the most consistently reported and hard-to-treat issues in cancer survivorship, leading to decreased insomnia. It’s an important advance because it offers survivors a non-pharmaceutical solution for reducing four different side-effects at once.”
