A four-week yoga program combining hatha and restorative styles helped ease insomnia, anxiety, fatigue and mood changes in cancer survivors, a clinical study has found, suggesting a non-pharmacological way to improve quality of life after treatment.
Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center in the United States said Thursday that the program effectively alleviated insomnia and emotional difficulties among cancer survivors. The findings will be presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, which opens in Chicago on Saturday.
To verify the clinical effects of the Yoga for Cancer Survivors (YOCAS) program, the research team recruited 410 patients from 12 community cancer care sites across the U.S. Participants had an average age of 54, were predominantly white women, and breast cancer survivors made up about 75% of the group. Patients with metastatic cancer were excluded, and only those who had not practiced yoga in the past three months were eligible.
Among the participants, 206 received the four-week yoga program in addition to standard care, while the remaining 204 received standard care alone. Standard care included maintenance therapy, regular follow-up exams and monitoring for side effects.
The yoga program centered on 18 hatha and restorative yoga poses. Under the guidance of professional instructors, participants attended 75-minute classes twice a week and also performed breathing exercises and mindfulness meditation. They continued the practice at home for at least 30 minutes per week. Actual practice averaged about three sessions per week, totaling around 180 minutes.
As a result, the yoga group showed significantly lower overall mood disturbance scores than the group that received standard care alone. Anxiety was reduced, and improvements in fatigue were also marked. The researchers concluded that as mood and fatigue recovered, sleep quality improved as well. Improvements in mood and reductions in fatigue accounted for about 25% of the sleep improvement effect.
According to ASCO, up to 95% of cancer survivors experience sleep disorders during or after treatment, and more than half of patients simultaneously suffer from mood changes, anxiety and fatigue. However, no single behavioral therapy has yet been established to address all four of these symptoms at once.
Dr. Fumiko Chino of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in the U.S., who reviewed the study, said, "Structured yoga can help alleviate the symptoms that cancer survivors most commonly experience and that are not easy to treat." She added, "It is meaningful in that it presents a non-pharmacological option that can simultaneously reduce multiple symptoms for patients who are already taking several medications."
Professor Po-Ju Lin, who led the study, said, "There has effectively been no behavioral therapy that manages mood changes, anxiety, fatigue and insomnia in cancer survivors all at once." She added, "This clinical trial showed that yoga can improve these symptoms simultaneously."
As a follow-up, the researchers plan to develop a customized yoga program targeting adolescent and young adult cancer survivors, and to build a digital version using online platforms and mobile applications. However, since these results are at the conference presentation stage, they should be interpreted as preliminary findings until publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
