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Published on: January 22, 2018
Prospective study of new participants in a community-based mind-body training program
Sung W Lee1, Carol A Mancuso, Mary E Charlson
1Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY, USA. SWL9001@med.cornell.edu
Background:
Mind-body practices such as yoga are widely popular, but little is known about how such exercises impact health-related quality of life.
Objective:
To measure changes in health-related quality of life associated with 3 months of mind-body training as practiced in community-based settings.
Design:
Prospective cohort study.
Setting:
Eight centers for practice of mind-body training.
Participants:
One hundred ninety-four English-speaking adults who had taken no more than 10 classes at the centers prior to enrollment in the study. One hundred seventy-one (88%) returned the 3-month follow-up questionnaire.
Intervention:
Administration of the SF-36 questionnaire at the start of training and after 3 months.
Measurements And Main Results:
At baseline, new participants in mind-body training reported lower scores than U.S. norms for 7 of 8 domains of the SF-36: mental health, role emotional, social, vitality, general health, body pain, and role physical (P <.002 for all comparisons). After 3 months of training, within-patient change scores improved in all domains (P <.0001), including a change of +15.5 (standard deviation +/-21) in the mental health domain. In hierarchical regression analysis, younger age (P=.0003), baseline level of depressive symptoms (P=.01), and reporting a history of hypertension (P=.0054) were independent predictors of greater improvement in the SF-36 mental health score. Five participants (2.9%) reported a musculoskeletal injury.
Conclusions:
New participants in a community-based mind-body training program reported poor health-related quality of life at baseline and moderate improvements after 3 months of practice. Randomized trials are needed to determine whether benefits may be generalizable to physician-referred populations.
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