Participating in yoga classes after breast cancer treatment could help women to recover quicker.
According to a new study, breast cancer survivors who took 12 weeks of yoga classes ended up with less inflammation and weren’t as tired after six months, compared with a control group who did not attend such sessions.
“This may be a way to provide a good activity that also has other benefits,” Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health.
Ms Kiecolt-Glaser is an investigator at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Care Center and the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research in Columbus.
The researchers studied 200 breast cancer survivors, who finished their treatments at least two months before the study began. One group of women went to 90-minute yoga sessions twice a week for 12 weeks, while the other group were told to avoid the activity.
Before the trial, both groups of women scored an average of 14 on a fatigue scale of 0 to 30 – where higher results indicated greater fatigue levels. After the study, the average score for the yoga group was five, whereas it was 13 among the non-yoga group.
The full findings of this study are published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.