THURSDAY, MAY 20 (Health.com) — Cancer survivors often feel fatigued and have trouble sleeping for months—or even years—after their last chemotherapy or radiation session. Now, a new study shows that yoga can help them sleep better, feel more energized, and cut back on sleeping medications.
“We really wanted to find something useful, because right now there are not a lot of good treatments out there for fatigue,” says the lead author of the study, Karen Mustian, PhD, an assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, in Rochester, N.Y.
Compared to sleep medication, yoga “can be really empowering,” says Suzanne Danhauer, PhD, a professor of psychosocial oncology at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, in Winston-Salem, N.C. Sleep medications aren’t always effective and can have side effects, and people who’ve just been through cancer treatment may not want to take any more drugs, adds Danhauer, who studies the benefits of yoga for cancer patients but didn’t participate in the new study.
The study included 410 cancer survivors who had completed treatment in the previous two years and had been experiencing sleep problems for at least two months. All but 16 of the patients were women, and 75% were breast cancer survivors. In addition to the standard post-treatment care that everyone received, half of the study participants attended 75-minute yoga sessions twice a week for a month.
The sessions, which were based on two forms of low-intensity yoga known as Hatha yoga and restorative yoga, included breathing exercises, meditation, and 18 different poses. “This wasn’t some kind of power Vinyasa yoga class,” says Mustian. “It was gentle.”
At the beginning of the study, just under 85% of the participants in both the yoga and control groups were experiencing sleep problems. By the end, 31% of the patients who’d done yoga were sleeping soundly, compared to just 16% of the control group. The yoga participants were also using about 20% less sleep medication, on average, while the people in the control group actually upped their intake of sleep drugs by 5%.
Additionally, the yoga participants had substantially lower levels of fatigue and daytime sleepiness compared to the control group.
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