Yoga Helps Breast Cancer Patients

June 3, 2003 (Chicago) — Breast cancer treatment is not easy to endure, but preliminary study results suggest that women can ease the discomfort and improve their overall sense of well-being by practicing yoga.

Moreover, yoga works just as well for women who are so unfamiliar with it that the program is called “gentle movement and stretching” as it does for women who join a yoga class at an upscale health club.

Alyson B. Moadel, PhD, director of the psychosocial oncology program at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, presented results of her study at a meeting of cancer specialists.

Yoga helps women “feel more relaxed and the breathing exercises seem to be especially helpful for dealing with nausea,” says Moadel.

Biggest Yoga Benefit

But women in the study said the biggest benefit from yoga was the sense of well-being that they received from both yoga classes and home yoga sessions.

In the study, Moadel and her colleagues studied 126 women undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. The average age of the women was 53 and most of them had stage I or II breast cancer. Some were assigned to yoga classes and the rest to a yoga wait list comparison group.

The yoga program consisted of 12 weeks of classes three times a week and daily home practice sessions guided by audiotapes.

Overall, the women assigned to the yoga program had a 12% improvement in quality of life measurements, compared with women in the comparison group, says Moadel. In addition to improved sense of well-being, the women had less fatigue and better physical functioning, she says.

At the same time, the women in the comparison group said they were experiencing more social and emotional distress.

Striking Results

Moadel says the difference between women doing yoga versus women who were assigned to the yoga wait-list comparison group was striking. On a quality-of-life score, the women in the yoga group improved their social well-being scores by more than three points on average, while scores for women in the comparison group declined by about half a point, she says.

Pamela J. Goodwin, MD, MSc, senior scientist, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute and associate professor of medicine, University of Toronto, tells WebMD that yoga is “used by about 10% of women undergoing cancer treatment. It is just one of several psycho-social interventions that appear to be beneficial, but the challenge is to determine what women will benefit from this intervention and to determine if the benefit is different from the general population.”

Nonetheless, Goodwin, who wasn’t involved in the study, says that any benefit is encouraging.

Article by Peggy Peck

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