All along our parents and grandparents have been right. The age old importance of yoga that was handed down from generation to generation has been proved right after all. In two separate studies published online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) on September 4, it was demonstrated that yoga and exercise not only help in maintaining quality of life in women with early-stage breast cancer but can actually improve it too.
In the first study that explored the effects of exercise on quality of life, physical fitness and body composition in women receiving chemotherapy for early-stage breast cancer, Canadian scientists made the observation that resistance and aerobic exercise improved physical fitness, self-esteem and body composition, and that resistance exercise improved chemotherapy completion rates.
Termed as the Supervised Trial of Aerobic versus Resistance Training (START) trial, this study was carried out by dividing women into thre separate groups: one group was given only supervised resistance exercise three times every week, another group was given only supervised aerobic exercise three times every week and the third one was given neither of the exercises.
It was found that resistance exercise helped improve muscle strength, body mass and self-esteem while aerobic exercise was reponsible for enhancing aerobic fitness and body fat percentage.
The second study carried out by the same group of scientists was the first study to dig deep into benefits of yoga in an ethnically diverse population of women with breast cancer (primarily Hispanic and African-American women). It compared the quality of life of 88 women who took one yoga class per week for 12 weeks and 44 women who didn’t take yoga classes; all the women had early-stage breast cancer and about half the women received chemotherapy treatment during the said period. The results demonstrated that yoga lessons were especially useful for those women who weren’t subjected to chemotherapy treatment.
Both the studies once again highlight the escalating importance of yoga and exercice in not only fighting against breast cancer in women but also in the medicinal world as a whole. Among women worldwide, breast cancer is the most common form of cancer and also the most common cause of cancer death and now that the significance of yoga has been proved in combating it, one can expect more and more people to turn towards this gift called yoga.
Image Source:Yoga Retreat Directory
Source:Medicine World