New York, October 23: A recent study has suggested that engaging in heated yoga sessions once a week may offer potential benefits in reducing depression. This research, conducted by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), reveals the potential of heated yoga as a treatment option for individuals dealing with moderate-to-severe depressive symptoms.
In a randomized controlled clinical trial involving adults with moderate-to-severe depression, depressive symptoms showed significant improvement, even when participants received only half of the recommended yoga sessions. This suggests that practicing heated yoga once a week could have therapeutic value.
During the eight-week trial, 80 participants were divided into two groups. The first group engaged in 90-minute Bikram yoga sessions conducted in a room heated to 40.5 degrees Celsius, while the second group was placed on a waitlist. The waitlist participants later completed the yoga intervention following their waitlist period.
The analysis included 33 participants from the yoga group and 32 from the waitlist group. Although participants in the intervention group were prescribed a minimum of two yoga classes per week, they attended an average of 10.3 classes over the eight-week period.
After eight weeks, the yoga group experienced a significantly greater reduction in depressive symptoms, as measured using the clinician-rated Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (IDS-CR) scale, compared to the waitlisted participants. Additionally, 59.3 percent of the yoga participants achieved a 50 percent or greater reduction in symptoms, in contrast to only 6.3 percent of those on the waitlist.
Furthermore, 44 percent of the participants in the yoga group reached IDS-CR scores so low that their depression was considered to be in remission. This was in contrast to 6.3 percent in the waitlist group, as reported in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
Maren Nyer, the lead author and director of Yoga Studies at the Depression Clinical and Research Programme at Massachusetts General Hospital, noted that yoga and heat-based interventions have the potential to revolutionize depression treatment by offering a non-medication-based approach that comes with additional physical benefits.
Nyer, who is also an assistant professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, mentioned, "We are currently developing new studies with the goal of determining the specific contributions of each element -- heat and yoga -- to the clinical effects we have observed in depression."
The participants in the study rated the heated yoga sessions positively, and there were no serious adverse effects associated with the intervention. Senior author David Mischoulon, Director of the Depression Clinical and Research Programme at Massachusetts General Hospital, emphasized the need for future research to compare heated and non-heated yoga for depression to assess the additional benefits of heat in depression treatment.
