Yoga may improve anxiety, depression symptoms

Key takeaways:

• Yoga could improve symptoms of depression and anxiety, but the evidence certainty was very low for all outcomes.
• Improving the research quality in this field is needed to create specific recommendations.

Yoga-based interventions might help improve mental health symptoms for adults diagnosed with anxiety or depressive disorders, according to results published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Recent research has indicated that different exercise programs are helpful in reducing anxiety symptoms and offer antidepressant effects, Javier Martínez-Calderon, a professor at the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain, and colleagues wrote.

“Empirical research in mind-body practices, specifically qigong, tai chi and yoga, has grown exponentially in the field of neuroscience and mental illness in the last decade,” they wrote. “Notably, the improvement of brain health after applying tai chi or yoga is supported by recent reviews.”

Despite the strides in research, the researchers said, “there are still some important gaps in current knowledge,” which led them to conduct a systematic review with meta-analysis and meta-regression to evaluate the impact mind-body exercises may have on anxiety and depression symptoms in adults with those disorders.

They searched five electronic databases and performed manual searches to explore related systematic reviews, secondary analyses of clinical trials and clinical trial protocols. Ultimately, the researchers included 23 studies composed of 22 different samples with a total of 1,420 participants.

Meta-analyses indicated that yoga interventions were superior to control when it came to reducing anxiety symptoms in those with anxiety disorders and depression symptoms in depressive disorders, according to Martinez-Calderon and colleagues. There were no differences between groups for the rest of the comparisons.

“The main clinical finding of this systematic review has been the possible beneficial effect that yoga-based interventions may have on anxiety and depression symptoms in anxiety and depressive disorders, respectively,” the researchers wrote. “A large body of evidence supports the relevance of this mind-body exercise in improving disease related symptoms in different mental disorders.”

However, the researchers noted that the evidence certainty was very low for all outcomes because of concerns regarding the inconsistency and imprecision of the results, high risk of bias and indirectness of the evidence. There was also marked heterogeneity among yoga-based interventions and self-reported tools used to measure outcomes. Therefore, “despite the interesting clinical findings, we should be cautious before recommending the use of yoga-based interventions to treat anxiety and depressive disorders,” the researchers wrote.

“We cannot make definitive clinical recommendations due to the very low certainty of the evidence, several methodological concerns and the heterogeneity of qigong, tai chi and yoga styles among studies,” Martinez-Calderon and colleagues wrote. “Therefore, a specific yoga style cannot be recommended with the current evidence. A call for action for improving the quality of research in this field is needed.”

The researchers wrote that they did not find trials assessing qigong or tai chi in anxiety disorders, and the number of yoga trials was scarce.

“Addressing the observed methodological concerns may help to clarify the role of these mind-body exercises in anxiety and depression disorders,” they wrote. “An interesting future agenda may include improved and increased numbers of high-quality clinical trials evaluating these mind-body exercises in these mental disorders.”