New Study Supports Our Personal Bias! Yoga is Good for Older Adults!

by Baxter

Baxter in My Yoga Room by Nina Zolotow

One of the benefits of our blog is that we get to keep up on all the latest developments in research on yoga and aging. Just the other day, Nina came across an abstract from the National Institutes of Health that piqued my fancy, which was titled “The effects of yoga on physical functioning and health related quality of life in older adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” Man, is that a mouthful! What the authors were interested in finding out was how yoga compared to other forms of physical activity. Well, let me have them tell you what their goal was:

“The goal was to review systematically the comparative effectiveness of yoga, compared with other exercise interventions, for older adults as shown on measures of health and physical functioning.”

Okay, so once again, researchers are limiting their look at yoga to the physical level of yoga asana, but to me, any advancement in acknowledging the benefits of yoga for aging is a step in the right direction.

So, how did they go about figuring out the answer to their question? Well, they scoured the studies that had already been done; in other words, they looked back to see what other folks had already done, instead of designing a new study of their own from scratch. This can be a helpful way of answering some questions, especially if you can find enough studies out there that meet your criterion to include in your analysis. In this case, they looked for studies published in English, done between 1950 and 2010, which were a certain kind of study that is considered more objective, and they looked in a variety of sources, including ones like PubMed. When all was sifted through, they found 18 studies that qualified and met their specific standards.

What their analysis of the data from these 18 studies yielded sounds pretty promising, with a few caveats where either the data was not so strong or just didn’t support yoga helping at all, like with cognitive issues such as Alzheimer’s Disease. Here’s what they found:

“[our analysis] suggested that the benefits of yoga may exceed (emphasis is mine) those of conventional exercise interventions for self-rated health status, aerobic fitness, and strength. However, the effect sizes were modest, and the evidence was mixed for yoga's effect on depression, sleep, and bone-mineral density. Studies did not find an effect on cognition.” 

As is almost always to case, they go on to say that while these findings are encouraging, what is needed is more studies, well-designed, with a lot more participants involved. Good news for future yoga therapists wanting to do research, but mixed news for the rest of us. But again, overall, any news like this is encouraging for those of us doing yoga regularly that our efforts do bear some good fruit. Perfect timing for this harvest season! And if we are lucky, Brad might lend us his scientific take on this study in a future post.

To read the abstract in its entirety, see here.