A new study has just been published in the journal ‘Complementary Therapies in Medicine’ – “Yoga for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis” – and the results are promising.
Yoga has been widely practiced and according to the research available, has recently shown benefits in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD), however, evidence is inconsistent. The researchers conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis by searching PubMed/Medline, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), EMBASE and Web of Science from inception to May 31, 2020 for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) comparing yoga with usual care or non-pharmacological interventions in patients with CHD. The primary outcomes were all-cause mortality and health related quality of life (HR-QoL). Secondary outcomes were a composite cardiovascular outcome, exercise capacity and cardiovascular risk factors (blood pressure, lipid profiles and body mass index). Pooled results showed that compared with usual care, yoga had no effect on all-cause mortality, but it significantly improved HR-QoL . A non-significant reduction of the composite cardiovascular outcome was observed. Serum level of triglyceride and high density lipoprotein cholesterol, blood pressure and body mass index were also significantly improved. The study comparing yoga with control exercise also reported significantly better effects of yoga on HR-QoL . And thankfully, no severe adverse events related to yoga were reported.
Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death globally, causing 9.4 million deaths in 2016 – and exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation (CR) programs were developed for the secondary prevention of CHD. Exercise-based CR has established itself as an effective strategy for secondary prevention for CHD. However, the infrastructure needed to deliver exercise-based CR are expensive and unavailable to many patients. Therefore, alternative and cost-effective models of CR are needed to ensure participation globally. Many studies have demonstrated that yoga could modify cardiovascular risk factors, such as blood pressure (BP), lipid profiles, blood glucose and anxiety, but evidence of yoga for secondary prevention of CHD is limited – and so any studies of this nature are welcomed.
