A new study found that those with chronic back pain might benefit from regular yoga. Three months of weekly yoga classes eased back pain more than the usual course of care — an informative back pain booklet said researchers. Even a year later, patients with chronic back pain who had participated in yoga classes reported less pain than those who hadn't been assigned the classes.
The study, conducted in the United Kingdom, followed 313 adults with nonspecific chronic back pain — in other words, ongoing back pain with no known physical cause. “Even for patients who still had pain, they showed an improvement in being able to perform their normal daily activities,” said study researcher David Torgerson, of the University of York. The results were published Oct. 31 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
This study comes as a complement to another U.S.-based study published last week that saw similar improvement in back pain among patients who participated in either yoga or stretching classes. In the study published Oct. 24 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researcher Karen Sherman of the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle found that classes focused solely on stretching also provided a benefit.
For this study Torgerson and his colleagues recruited 313 back pain patients from throughout the U.K. All participants were given booklets on coping with back pain; 156 were also assigned three months of yoga classes.
The assigned yoga classes were run by 20 separate teachers, who all had special training in using yoga to treat back pain. Each weekly class was 75 minutes long, and designed for beginners. Additionally, instructors handed out home practice sheets so that the patients could continue to practice throughout the week.
“These classes were more gentle than a typical yoga class,” Torgerson said, “because the yoga teachers didn't want to exacerbate any back pain. They put together a series of yoga poses that would increase, if patients could manage it, the ability to move.” After three months, patients completed written questionnaires about their pain levels and how their back pain influenced their daily activities. More questionnaires were completed six months and 12 months after the start of the study.
At the conclusion of the yoga class, patients who had taken it were able to do 30 percent more activities than those who had received only the booklet. In addition, they reported more of a decrease in pain. Sixty percent of those from the yoga group said they were still practicing yoga on their own.
Average “disability” levels started out at 8 on a scale of 0 to 24 in both groups, with 24 representing the most difficulty with everyday activities. By the end of the yoga classes, those scores had dropped more than 2 points, to between 5.5 and 6 among yoga participants, but didn't change in the non-yoga group.
“This is an intervention that people can do at home once they've been trained to do it,” Torgerson said, citing one of the benefits of yoga over other types of treatment that require office visits for every flare up.
“The main thing is that people need a number of options,” Sherman from the other study said. “Because nothing is going to work for everybody, and for these cases of nonspecific back pain, conventional medicine doesn't have much to offer.” Sherman's trial was designed similarly to the new U.K. study, and included 228 adults. They were assigned to either yoga classes, stretching exercises or given an informational booklet. Both stretching and yoga improved patients' back pain. “When you see two different studies showing similar things, it gives you confidence that the results are robust,” Sherman said.
Both studies focused on patients with mild to moderate pain who had no other major health problems, Sherman said. Further studies may explore how yoga or stretching can ease more severe back pain, or help patients who have other health problems in addition to their back pain.
Still, Sherman cautions patients against racing to the nearest gym to sign up for yoga classes. “The yoga classes we studied weren't just any yoga class,” she said. “It's important to find an instructor who is accustomed to teaching beginners and accustomed to using yoga therapeutically.”
Alan Silman of Arthritis Research UK (the group that funded the research) added, “This extremely common condition cannot be managed with painkillers alone and there is an urgent need to have non-drug therapies that sufferers can utilize in their own home.”
“It gives us more confidence that the benefits seen with this class-based intervention seem to apply when it's done in different areas by different teachers,” said Dr. Timothy Carey, from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has researched back pain but wasn't involved in either report.
A single yoga or stretching session may cost about $20, making it cheaper than the alternative treatments. Carey said that general exercise and stretching - whether it's done in a yoga class or not - is helpful for most people with chronic back pain. “The important thing about exercise is, you need to do a type of exercise that you enjoy and that you can work with in your schedule and your lifestyle,” he said. “It's important to kind of hang in there with the exercise, and I think that's where the classes may help,” Carey added.
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