Mar 4, 2014 10:43am

Yoga can help ease pain, fatigue and depression in women battling breast cancer, a new study found. (Image credit:Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images)

By Danielle Krol, M.D. (@dailydosemd)

Yoga can help ease pain, fatigue and depression among women battling breast cancer, a new study found. It might even help them survive.

The study of 191 breast cancer patients linked yoga to improvements in self-reported quality of life, including measures of mood, pain and fatigue. Practicing yoga also appeared to help regulate the stress hormone cortisol, which is tied to poor survival among breast cancer patients.

The benefits of yoga are above and beyond stretching, said Lorenzo Cohen, a professor of oncology at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and lead author of the study published Monday in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These findings may improve outcomes in cancer survivors.

To conduct the study, Cohen and his team randomly assigned 191 women with breast cancer who were undergoing radiation therapy into one of three groups. One group did yoga, another did simple stretching exercises, and a third group did neither. The participants in the yoga and stretching groups attended sessions for one hour, three days a week throughout the six weeks of their radiation therapy.

Throughout the study, Cohens team asked patients a series of questions assessing their quality of life, fatigue level and sleep quality, and tested their cortisol levels. By comparing the groups, they found yoga significantly reduced fatigue, raised physical function and health perception scores and reduced cortisol levels.

Dr. Barrie Cassileth, chief of the integrative medicine service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said the new findings lend additional weight to the science behind mind-body approaches to cancer treatment.

Yoga is a very important intervention, and this was a high quality investigation, said Cassileth, who was not involved with the study. This study looked beyond the physical benefits of yoga by looking at the physiologic measure of stress: cortisol.

Read more:
How Yoga Can Help Women with Breast Cancer