New Delhi, Jan. 25 -- Yoga works much like antidepressants and psychotherapy and helps tackle most mental health problems including depression, attention deficiency and even schizophrenia, researchers have concluded, giving the ancient Indian practice science's most comprehensive thumbs up yet.

Like medication commonly prescribed for major psychiatric disorders, yoga helps modulate levels of key chemicals like serotonin, and stress hormone cortisol, a review by scientists at Duke University has confirmed.

For some illnesses, yoga may work as a standalone remedy, and in others, as an adjunct to medicine, they found.

"Additionally, there is likely to be a positive group effect when one practices yoga in a group," Dr Meera Balasubramaniam, the lead author of the research told HT.

Yoga is estimated as practiced by over 200 million people worldwide, including over 100 million in India and about 16 million in the US.

But while its general use in helping psychical and mental health is widely recognized, medical science - particularly outside India - has till now viewed its potential to tackle specific major illnesses with skepticism.

As the practice gained popularity globally through the latter half of the 20th century, with cultural icons like the Beatles and a galaxy of Hollywood stars subscribing to it, several cases of fraud gurus duping innocent people also started popping up.

Even in India, though yoga is widely accepted and followed as a cure for multiple ailments, medical doctors have had to counter outlandish - and potentially misleading - claims from popular yoga masters like Baba Ramdev.

The Haridwar-based guru in 2006 said be could cure HIV-AIDS, a claim he has been unable to substantiate.

"Yoga has become such a cultural phenomenon that it has become difficult for physicians and patients to differentiate legitimate claims from hype," the authors of the Duke research have written, in their paper published on January 24 in the respected journal Frontiers in Psychiatry. "Our goal was to examine whether the evidence matched the promise."

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Yoga gets biggest science thumbs up yet