Category Archives: Research

Upward-Facing Soldier

Posted on April 15, 2012 | 1 Comment
By LAUREN K. WALKER from The New York Times

YOU are sitting behind the Humvee where you’ve dragged a wounded soldier. You’ve wrapped the gaping hole in his leg, given him a shot of morphine and radioed up the line for help. Your eye is trained on a distant, hazy point through the scope of an assault rifle. You can see the tiny, magnified bodies of your enemy. Maybe they are waiting for another explosion. A bigger one. Your heart starts pounding harder. The temperature is over 100 degrees. The kid next to you, a kid you always found slightly annoying, with his Massachusetts accent and his unwillingness to walk in the front position of the line, is now holding a bloody pad to his thigh and biting down on a bandanna to keep from screaming. Sweat is pouring down his face. There is no easy way out. You simply have to wait and try not to give away your position. Through your scope you can see their rocket launchers in a pile on the ground.

What you do, without moving your hands from the rifle, is to start breathing, because you realize you have been holding your breath for a long time. So you deepen it. Slow, deeper, deeper. The hiccups of fear start to mellow out. You can feel your belly soften a bit. Then you visualize your breath. In the left nostril, out the right. In the right, out the left. After just a minute, the mad thumping in your chest begins to slow. You hold the fingertips of one hand to your forehead to calm the fight-or-flight response so you can think clearly. The situation has not changed, but you feel yourself change, and you are now able to deal with it.

Back in the safe and cold green mountains of central Vermont, I walk into the yoga room to face a roomful of boys and girls. They are 17, 18, 20 years old, but they seem more like boys and girls than men and women. The stress in my students’ lives is not at combat level. Yet. Right now, most of them have the stress of being in the Corps of Cadets at a military college. That means P.T. at 5:30 in the morning, and constant building, running, gunning, learning, hiking, jumping and being yelled at.

Norwich University, the birthplace of R.O.T.C. and the oldest private military college in the country, trains both military cadets and civilians in discipline, integrity, confidence, loyalty and honor.

From here, many of my military students will deploy to the deserts of Afghanistan. I have a boy leaving next week.

They are young. They are strong. They have incredible stamina. But they don’t have fluency or ease within their bodies. They do push-ups and pull-ups and bench presses and weighted lunges. They run 10 or 20 miles with heavy packs on. But they don’t know how to breathe or to access the core muscles in their abdomens that could help them hump their packs or carry a buddy to safety. I teach them this, and also, how to find that place deep inside that is whole, untouchable, sacred.

Halfway through the semester, I ask my students how they think yoga will help them. Why did they sign up for this class? “It helps us to focus on the good,” one says. “That’s the only way we can get through this place.”

I think of them as if they are in the Bhagavad Gita, the great Indian treatise on war. The soldier Arjuna stops on the battlefield and cries out to Lord Krishna: “Do I have to do this? Do I have to kill?” Krishna, instead of telling him what to do on the battlefield, teaches him yoga. So that is what I do. I teach them yoga.

I am humbled by this prospect, but I come in to the classroom strong. This is a community used to leadership. They stand at attention and call me ma’am. I have to show that I have enough strength to lead them. But I don’t teach them strength. They learn that enough. One girl said to me, “This is the only class where I don’t get yelled at.”

I want them to love and respect themselves. At the end of class, when they lie on their mats in savasana like children at nap time, I nurture and tuck in these bodies. I hold their ankles and swing their legs back and forth to let their hips soften. I roll their shoulder blades under their backs to help open their hearts. I hold their heads in my hands, while they lie there. They don’t get touched here, at military college. They don’t get nurtured. Everything is hard and harsh and angry and fast and sharp. Some of them are so stiff and rigid. They hold their heads at attention even when they’re lying down.

“Let go,” I say. “I’ve got you.” They relax their necks and let their heads sink into my waiting hands. Their hair is buzzed to the scalp or tied back in a tight bun. I hold their heads and pray over them. I pray with all my might that God does the right thing by this boy or this girl. I place their heads down on the blankets and hold my thumb over their third eye, hoping that they keep their intuition strong and will remember that their inner souls are stronger than any enemy outside of them, seen or not seen.

In the beginner’s class, it’s all I can do to keep my students breathing while they move. In the advanced class, I teach these future soldiers the profound philosophy of yoga: how to sit in a stress position and still breathe, smoothly and steadily. How to keep minds open and flexible, to develop non-attachment, compassion, contentment.

We talk about what it would be like to have a buddy blown open next to you. How you would immediately feel yourself flooded with the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. How your natural impulse would be to run like hell to get out of there, or to train a machine gun at the horizon and blaze away at everything in your path. How much harder it is to remain calm, to analyze the situation and respond from a place of strength.

It may seem out of whack to hold chaturanga for 10 breaths and think this will be preparation for war. But in fact, this is what yoga is all about. And in fact, if there is anything at all that could truly prepare them to go and fight, it is yoga.

Many people ask me about ahimsa — the grand yogic tenet of nonviolence. I respond with what the revered yoga teacher T. K. V. Desikachar says: It simply means that we must always behave with consideration and attention to others.

So I teach them this, too.

Indeed, Arjuna killed members of his own family. He was following his dharma, and his conscience. He was fulfilling his destiny, playing out the role in the world that he, and only he, was created for.

In the world we have created, there is a huge divide between the ideal and the real. If everyone truly wanted no more war, we would have to change the behavior that leads us into war. But I am not here to teach the world to have no more war. That is for the Dalai Lama. I am here to teach these soldiers, these young men and women who are willing to pay for our system of democracy with their lives, how to uncover the truth of who they are. Who they are — warriors, lawyers, doctors, mothers, fathers, teachers, priests — is each one’s own specific path. I am here to help them find their inner souls, and to help them walk their paths with honesty, integrity and grace. It is what I teach in every yoga class.

But here at this military college, it feels weighted with much more consequence.

Lauren K. Walker runs the yoga program for veterans, cadets and civilians at Norwich University.

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Posted in Health, personal yoga practice, Research, Trauma

Yoga Could Help Teens Ward Off Anxiety, Study Shows

Posted on April 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

From the Huffington Post

Considering yoga’s stress-busting effects, one would think that high-schoolers might benefit from the practice.

And now, a study shows that yoga does confer benefits to teens. The research is published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School conducted their study on 51 junior and senior high school students. Some of the students did a 10-week yoga PE class, and some did a regular PE class. The yoga PE class included Kripalu yoga, which included meditation, relaxation and breathing exercises, along with yoga poses.

At the beginning of the 10 week study, all the students took a number of psychological tests for things like mood problems, anxiety, mindfulness, resilience and anger expression.

The researchers found that by the end of the study, the teens who did yoga scored higher on some of the psychological tests, while the teens who didn’t do yoga scored worse on some of the tests. For example, teens who did not do yoga during their PE classes scored higher for mood problems or anxiety, while those who did do yoga scored lower on these tests, or their scores remained the same from the beginning of the study period.

In addition, the teens who didn’t do yoga reported more negative emotions during the study period, while the teens who did do yoga reported fewer negative emotions.

Plus, the study seemed to show that the teens liked the yoga classes — the researchers reported that almost 75 percent of the teens who did yoga said they would like to keep taking yoga.

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Posted in Children, Research

Yoga offers benefits for people with special needs

Posted on March 19, 2012 | 3 Comments

Calm, strength and stamina are among benefits seen

  • Yoga sessions with instructor Karen Fakroddin have improved mobility, strength and digestion for Erin Feeney, who has cerebral palsy.
Yoga sessions with instructor Karen Fakroddin have improved mobility,… (Chuck Berman, Chicago Tribune)
March 14, 2012|By Joan Cary, Special to the Tribune

Erin Feeney capped off her 19th birthday celebration with a huge accomplishment that still makes her smile.

For the first time in her life, she was able to blow out her birthday candle.

On Nov. 11 last year, when she turned 20, she did it again.

“Not two or three, but one, and one is way better than none,” said Erin’s mom, Louise Feeney of Naperville.

Erin has cerebral palsy, which alters all of her muscles, including her speech, but not her intelligence. Louise Feeney credits her daughter’s accomplishment with the birthday candle and other improvements in the quality of her life to yoga. A student at the College of DuPage, Erin spends an hour each week with Karen Fakroddin, a Yoga for the Special Child practitioner at Universal Spirit Yoga in Naperville.

Parents, educators and medical professionals are recognizing the benefits of yoga for young people with special needs, like Erin.

Three years of yoga have had a dramatic, positive impact on her daughter, Louise Feeney said. She believes that yoga has helped Erin with digestion, and given her more trunk control, less pain in her limbs, and more stamina, and helped with her breathing.

“The beauty of yoga is that it helps you wherever you are at,” said Fakroddin.

In Erin’s private yoga session, Louise Feeney helps move her daughter to the mat where Fakroddin cradles Erin in her arms, gently manipulating her constricted arms and legs to stretch out and to relax. She supports Erin, calmly encouraging her to use her neck muscles to lift her head for seconds. What to most are simple movements like putting her feet flat to the floor are slow and short-lived for Erin, but she is thrilled to accomplish them.

Yoga for the Special Child (www.specialyoga.com) is an international program designed by former Evanston resident Sonia Sumar in 1970 to help babies and children with cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, autism, attention deficit disorder and learning disabilities. There are now six certified practitioners in the Chicago area, and many in 26 other states and 12 other countries.

“The knowledge of yoga for special needs is up, and there is more coming,” said Fakroddin, who points out that practitioners never work without a doctor’s clearance and a thorough intake assessment. “It helps the special needs children to slow down, to focus. They are able to accept their limitations and work through them. It’s a tough world. To be able to empower them, to give them the tools to help themselves, is wonderful.”

Jessica Wheeler, 16, and Ellie Martin, 13, are enrolled in Fakroddin’s group class, and their mothers have witnessed improved strength, balance and posture in their daughters, as well as the joy of being in a social but noncompetitive class.

“It’s good for Ellie to be able to do something that everybody else can do,” said Suzanne Martin, of Naperville, whose daughter has a neuro-muscular disorder. “This is kind of an even playing field. Ellie can just join in. She loves swimming, but this is her favorite.”

Diane Wheeler, of Winfield, said Jessica, who has cognitive anxiety issues, uses her yoga breath at home and in class at Wheaton North High School to calm herself down.

“She’s more coordinated and can follow directions better,” Wheeler said.

He cautioned that instructors need to be informed and thoughtful about moves and positions, recognizing in particular that Down syndrome can present spinal cord issues.

“But yoga is going to benefit these kids more than it’s going to be a detriment,” he said.

The common thread among parents of special-needs children is that they want their child to learn how to relax and focus, said Erin Haddock, a Yoga for the Special Child practitioner at The Discovery Clinic in Glenview.

“You have to take it very, very slow. Any improvement is a success,” Haddock said. “We work with autistic children, and it’s a huge thing just for them to be OK with something new. One of the intangible benefits for them is self-confidence, being aware of themselves and knowing that they can control their own body.

“It’s great if you can start young, with early intervention,” Haddock said. “But with every case, we start very slowly. Toe and foot exercises. Eye movements. Working on the core strengths such as breathing and speaking. We have a girl in her teens who is just learning to walk. When she started, her feet were tight and curled up. It’s not what you would picture as your typical yoga session. At first it was a matter of rotating the toes gently, rotating the ankle, working on some standing poses.”

Nick Statkiewicz, 15, of Glenview, was one of Sumar’s first students and now works with Haddock. Nick came to his adoptive mother, Chris Statkiewicz, as a foster child of 3 with multiple diagnoses including autism and cognitive issues.

“Sometimes Nick’s body and his emotions go in all different directions,” Chris Statkiewicz said. “They said he’d never ride a bike, but he rides a bike. He shoots hoops. Yoga has helped him control his movements and limber up. There are times when he’s all over the place, and I will see him use his yoga to pull it all together. I am still surprised, but I see him do it all by himself.”

Statkiewicz believes every child should start the school day with yoga. “Think of how their days start. Get up. Get dressed. Eat. Get to school,” she said. “The children are hurried from one thing to another, emotions flying, and then a teacher says to sit down and start learning.”

In Kimberlee Goldsmith’s class at Bogan High School in Chicago, her 13 special-needs students, including 10 with autism, begin each school day with 25 minutes of yoga.

Goldsmith added it to her class time three years ago after observing how schools in India use yoga. She also incorporates academics such as counting by fives into their yoga time, maybe holding a pose for 25 seconds.

“They are much more focused during their yoga, so whatever lesson we incorporate, they learn and remember better throughout the day,” she said. “I have had many people inquire about what I do. There is not much written about it.”

At Brown Elementary in Chicago, 30 students, including 10 with special needs, stay for an elective Wednesday after school hip-hop yoga program offered through Carla Tantillo’s company, Mindful Practices, in Oak Park. A former teacher, Tantillo and her staff work with 20 schools, offering after school yoga programs. They also train teachers and staff to use yoga methods to calm their classes.

“The most powerful way to make a difference for special needs in a school setting is to train the auxiliary staff as well as the classroom teachers in calming methods, so everyone works as a team,” she said. “Every teacher is telling kids to calm down, be quiet, not be hyper, in a different way. Special-needs learners require continuity. They are often not given the tools besides medication to control their behavior. A calming program that is the same from class to class can give them those tools.”

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Posted in Children, Health, Research, yoga class

Medicare covers yoga for heart disease

Posted on February 25, 2012 | 1 Comment

By William Hudson, CNN
updated 12:06 PM EST, Sat February 25, 2012

Medicare covers yoga for heart disease

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease is covered by Medicare
  • Patients do yoga, eat a plant-based, meatless diet and meditate regularly
  • Kathy and Frank Korona have lost 85 pounds on the program

(CNN) — Frank Korona lives near the West Virginia-Pennsylvania border with his wife Kathy, in a house that he built with his own hands, on the same property where he grew up.

He served in the Army Special Forces in Vietnam. The Koronas have a long, proud tradition of military service, but their family’s greatest losses have been to heart disease.

“Our family has shrunk tremendously. We’ve lost so many people through death,” Kathy says.

In 1992, Frank’s brother Bob died in his arms, suffering a heart attack on their kitchen floor. Parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins have all died from complications from heart disease, too. The Koronas point them out in a graveyard near their home.

Frank and Kathy have both had heart attacks, and both have stents holding their blood vessels open. The birth of their grandson Caleb led them to try harder to extend their lives. So last year, the couple joined the Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease.

Medicare, the government health insurance program for Americans 65 and older, covers the Ornish program, which teaches a plant-based, meatless diet, meditation and regular exercise. The program was officially declared an intensive cardiac rehab program in 2010, and the first patients started in May 2011.

Ornish is a persistent advocate within the halls of government. There are mountains of scientific evidence that his recommended lifestyle changes do reverse heart disease, the No. 1 killer in the United States and worldwide.

Helping patients make these lifestyle changes costs Medicare about $70 per hour, and patients can receive up to 72 one-hour sessions. Proponents of preventative medicine point out that that cost is still much less than operations and medications.

Ornish believes that fear cannot motivate lifestyle change in people long-term. Change has to be about feeling better and having more zest for life. The greater the change, the better the feeling, he says.

Kathy and Frank Korona pose for a photo at a July 2008 wedding reception.
Kathy and Frank Korona pose for a photo at a July 2008 wedding reception.

That seems to ring true for the Koronas. Despite the grim history of heart disease, they say it’s how good they feel that keeps them living the lifestyle that their neighbors sometimes find strange.

“If I was going to be able to participate as a grandparent in his life, that gave me another incentive, that really did,” Kathy explains. “But in order to do that, I needed to feel good about myself first.”

The Koronas’ favorite yoga positions are “cobra” and “fish,” and their favorite pizza is meatless meat-lovers, made with soy pepperoni and soy “ground beef.”

“Usually at the end of the session, the instructor will say, ‘Now the reward, get into the total relaxation pose,’ and we do that, and it just feels so good,” Kathy says.

Together the Koronas have lost 85 pounds on the program, and Frank is off of four medications.

Hospitals can now bill Medicare for their patient’s yoga and group discussion sessions because the Ornish program is an approved intensive cardiac rehab program, a new class of cardiac rehab created by Congress in 2009.

Traditional cardiac rehab, developed in the 1950s and covered by Medicare since 1982, focuses almost exclusively on exercise — getting patients out of bed and the blood flowing again.

But in the 1970s, Ornish and others began leading experiments to test whether improving diet and stress levels could make a difference for those with heart disease. In the following decades the researchers published volumes of studies in peer-reviewed journals that became the basis of the Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease.

There are four components to the program: nutrition, stress management, moderate exercise and group support.

Part of the underlying cause for widespread heart disease, explains Ornish, is chronic loneliness and isolation, which lead to stress and bad habits. When people feel emotionally close to others, they’re physiologically healthier, too, so Medicare is paying for it.

In 1997, Highmark Health Insurance Co. became the first insurer to cover the Ornish program, but even today,only three insurance companies will pay for the program. All three are in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

That’s expected to change.

“The reason that I spent 16 years working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to achieve Medicare coverage for our program is that I knew that most insurance companies follow Medicare’s lead. In other words, if Medicare covered our program, most other insurance companies would, as well,” explains Ornish, who also says he was once naive in thinking that solid science alone would be enough to change health care policy.

“Reimbursement as well as science are primary determinants of medical practice. If it’s not reimbursable, it’s not sustainable.”

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Posted in Health, Nutrition, personal yoga practice, Research

Yoga helps breast cancer survivors curb fatigue

Posted on January 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

(Reuters Health) – About one third of breast cancer survivors experience fatigue that can affect their quality of life, but a small new study finds that doing yoga might help restore some lost vitality.

After three months of twice-weekly yoga classes, a group of breast cancer survivors in California reported significantly diminished fatigue and increased “vigor.” A control group of women who took classes in post-cancer health issues, but didn’t do yoga, had no changes in their fatigue or depression levels.

Dr. Maira Campos, a research scholar at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine who was not involved in the study, said the findings echo similar results from past studies that looked at yoga and cancer patients.

Persistent fatigue lasting years after cancer treatment is a common problem whose origin is unknown, and for which there are no validated treatments.

Some studies have shown that stress-reduction techniques or exercise classes can help reduce fatigue among cancer patients and survivors in general. But none of them has specifically targeted cancer survivors experiencing fatigue to see if a potential therapy reverses the problem, according to Julienne Bower, an associate professor in the psychology department of the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues.

They recruited 31 breast cancer survivors to undergo “treatment” for their fatigue over 12 weeks at the UCLA Medical Center. Each woman was randomly assigned to participate in either two 90-minute yoga classes every week or a two-hour health class once a week.

At the start of the study, each group of women had similar scores on a questionnaire that gauges fatigue levels.

The group taking the educational classes experienced about the same amount of fatigue and energy throughout the initial study period. However, the group taking the yoga class reported about a 26 percent drop in fatigue and a 55 percent increase in energy after the 12-week yoga regimen.

The women in the yoga group also continued to report significant improvements in fatigue levels three months after the classes stopped.

The findings, published in the journal Cancer, do not prove that yoga caused the improvements in fatigue levels. The researchers note, however, that both groups of women had similar expectations that their assigned “treatment” would help them, so a placebo effect is not a likely explanation for the benefits seen in the yoga group.

Jacquelyn Banasik, an associate professor in the College of Nursing at Washington State University, also noted improvements in cancer fatigue after yoga classes in a study she published in the Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners in 2010.

“I can’t say that yoga is the only way to achieve the results seen in ours and other studies,” Banasik told Reuters Health in an email. “A beginning ballet class — with (its) emphasis on form and positioning — might have similar effects. Gaining a sense of control over one’s physical body, when one has a disease like breast cancer, might be an important part of the benefit.”

Both of the studies by Bower and Banasik used Inyengar yoga, which, according to Banasik, emphasizes taking poses slowly and paying close attention to maintaining correct form.

Campos told Reuters Health that acupuncture, exercise and physical therapy are sometimes used to treat cancer survivors suffering from fatigue, without a prescription if their symptoms are mild.

She added that she would not prescribe yoga based just on the new study, however.

She said it would be better to compare yoga to another exercise instead of a health- class setting.

Campos also emphasized that it’s important for patients to talk to their doctors about fatigue during and after cancer treatments.

“The patient should not be suffering or impaired just because they had cancer,” Campos said.

SOURCE: bit.ly/sSZeZZ Cancer, online December 16, 2011.

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Posted in cancer, Health, personal yoga practice, Research

Cancer Patients Report Easier Recovery, Inner Strength and Renewed Optimism from ‘Inner Engineering’ Yoga and Meditation Program

Posted on December 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

From PRweb

Isha Foundation Offers Scholarships for Cancer Survivors to Attend Program with Sadhguru in Houston in May

Inspired by eager participation in its scholarship program for breast cancer survivors, Isha Foundation is extending its patient scholarships into 2012 and expanding it to include individuals who are recovering from cancer of any kind. The first Isha program to offer the new Cancer Survivors’ Scholarship is “Be, Breathe, Blossom – Technologies for Wellbeing”, a 3-day ‘Inner Engineering Program’ offering simple, but powerful yogic methods to bring about a deep state of meditativeness. This program will be offered by Isha Foundation founder, yogi and mystic, Sadhguru in Houston, Texas from May 4-6, 2012. (Venue TBA.) Cancer Survivors’ Scholarships offer recovering patients and cancer survivors a scholarship of $60 toward the 3-day Houston program fee. These scholarships can be obtained by e-mailing Houston(at)IshaFoundation(dot)org.

“Cancer treatment can be very traumatic for patients and their families, both from a health perspective and an economic perspective,” said Kalpana Rajdev, M.D., a family physician and President of Isha Foundation. “We are thrilled that patients and survivors of cancer are able to benefit so much from these scholarships, empowering them to receive a potent internal support system during one of the most physically and emotionally challenging times in their lives. The meditative process they receive in these three days is with them for life, supporting both their recovery and maintenance of health.”

According the American Cancer Society, twenty years of research on meditation indicates that meditative processes offer significant mental and physical benefits for those with cancer. “Research shows that meditation can help reduce anxiety, stress, blood pressure, chronic pain, and insomnia,” reports the ACS website. A 2008 study of those practicing Inner Engineering’s primary meditative practice, Shambhavi Mahamudra, revealed an instantaneous response of nervous system function during just 21-minutes of practice. These results support a direct and immediate impact of Shambhavi in modulating the autonomic nervous system—the involuntary aspect of the nervous system that is responsible for the stress-response.

Derived from the ancient yogic system, an elaborate system of inner technologies over 10,000 years old, Inner Engineering is a powerful program created by Sadhguru to instill a deep sense of inner balance, joy and mental clarity. According to Sadhguru, health benefits attained as a result of Inner Engineering are the by-product of overall balance achieved within the system. “In yoga, when we say ‘health,’ we don’t look at the body or the mind; we only look at the energy,” Sadhguru explained in a recent Huffington Post article. “If your energy body is in proper balance and in full flow, your physical body and mental body will be in perfect health.”

Many cancer patients who’ve taken Inner Engineering (IE) say that the program offered them a remarkable boost in emotional strength and a positive forward-looking perspective when they needed it the most.

“I have been through chemotherapy and radiation with all the side effects imaginable… I strongly feel that if I had not been doing the (Isha) practices, I would not have had this inner strength to deal with my situation the way I have,” explained Chitra Karnani of Bloomfield, MI. “I still have some challenges left to be dealt with, but I remain mentally and emotionally strong and feel capable to cope with whatever comes my way.”

Margie Hudnell of Dayton, Ohio felt that the Inner Engineering program helped markedly reduce the pain of her surgery and boost her recovery from treatment, as well.

“My recovery post-surgery was quite remarkable. Aside from the pain medicine provided in the recovery room following surgery, I did not have the need for further medication and my incision healed at least twice as quickly as normal as per my surgeon. I felt totally healed and so energetic that my family had to remind me to take it easy,” emphasized Margie. “The traditional radiation and chemotherapies were discussed as was the Tamoxifen protocol, however I opted to not accept these recommendations pending my early diagnosis, clean margins from the lumpectomy, established yoga practice and inclusion of neem & turmeric (documented anti-cancer properties) into my vegetarian diet.

The medical team supported my decisions, being aware that my yoga practices and dietary regimen supported my immune system and natural healing of the body and having witnessed my remarkable postsurgical recovery. I attribute my continued 11 years cancer-free state directly to my Isha practice and the dietary recommendations provided as part of the program designed by Sadhguru.”

Founded by Sadhguru 30 years ago, Isha Foundation is an international non-profit organization dedicated to cultivating human potential through the ancient yogic system. For more information about Isha Foundation, visit http://www.ishausa.org. For more information about Sadhguru visit http://www.Sadhguru.org. For more information about ‘Be, Breathe, Blossom—Technologies for Inner Wellbeing’ coming to Houston this May 4-6, or to apply for a patient scholarship, contact houston(at)ishafoundation(dot)org

An introductory video of the Inner Engineering program can be viewed at http://www.InnerEngineering.com
A free Isha meditation process can be experienced at http://www.IshaKriya.com Isha Kriya in itself is a powerful ongoing support for internal balance. This process, however, cannot offer all the benefits made available through the 3-day Inner Engineering intensive with Sadhguru.

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Posted in Health, Meditation, Nonprofit, Research

Study finds patients with metastatic breast cancer might benefit from yoga

Posted on December 17, 2011 | 1 Comment

From EmaxHealth

Patients with metastatic breast cancer might benefit from the practice of yoga, according to a new study presented at the 34th Annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (San Antonio, TX; December 6-10, 2011. A small randomized trial was collaboratively conducted by yogis and physicians, including S.K. Gopinath, MD, from the Department of Surgical, Medical and Radiation Oncology at the HCG-BIO Super Specialty Center in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. The researchers found that yoga might reduce psychological distress and modulate abnormal cortisol levels as well as immune responses in patients with metastatic breast cancer.

The randomized study was comprised of 45 women who underwent a daily yoga intervention and 46 who received standard supportive counseling. The subjects, with an average age of 50.5 years, were assessed at baseline and three months after the intervention.

The researchers found that the yoga intervention was markedly effective in improving psychosocial states. Following the study period, a statistically significant decrease was found in in anxiety, depression, perceived stress, fatigue severity, and fatigue interference in the yoga group, compared with the control group. Furthermore, the yoga group had a significant improvement in emotional function, role function, cognitive function, and global quality of life.

The investigators also evaluated biologic measures. At the beginning and the end of the intervention, daily saliva samples were collected at 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., and enzyme immune assay kits (Salimetrics) were used to evaluate cortisol levels. In addition, blood samples were collected for three consecutive days between 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. in order to enumerate the number of natural killer cells with flow cytometry. (Cytometry is a procedure that counts and examines microscopic particles, such as cells and chromosomes, by suspending them in a stream of fluid and passing them by an electronic detection apparatus.) Yoga was found to be of value in reducing cortisol levels.

A significant difference was found in the early morning (6:00 a.m.) cortisol levels. This finding means that cortisol, which is a measure of stress and naturally decreases when the body is at rest, was successfully modulated in the yoga group. Research has shown that patients with metastatic breast cancer whose diurnal (twice-daily) cortisol rhythms were flattened or abnormal have earlier mortality.

After the intervention, a significant increase in the percentage of natural killer cells was found in the yoga group, compared with the control group. Previous research has demonstrated that natural killer cells, which are naturally occurring cytotoxins (cell-killers), play a therapeutic role in the treatment of human cancers.

The study authors concluded that, in view of the foregoing laboratory values, yoga might improve overall quality of life in patients with metastatic breast cancer.

Psychosocial factors are much more difficult to quantify, compared to laboratory values such as cortisol levels. In order to define psychosocial outcomes, the researchers used a variety of common instruments to measure them: mood states (a hospital anxiety and depression scale), sleep quality (the Pittsburgh Insomnia Rating Scale), quality of life (the EORTC Core Quality of Life Questionnaire for breast cancer [QLQ-C30]), and perceived stress (a perceived stress scale). Data were analyzed using both parametric (analysis of covariance, with a respective baseline measure as a covariate) and nonparametric (the Mann–Whitney U test) tests to evaluate the effects of intervention on the outcome measures. In addition, data for salivary cortisol were log transformed, and area under the curve and cortisol slope were computed using a linear mixed-effects model.

The researcher noted that the cancer patients were most likely under great duress. They wrote: “Metastatic breast cancer patients experience tremendous psychological distress due to treatment, disease, and uncertainty of their survival.”

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Posted in Health, Research

Veterans learn to use yoga and meditation exercises to reconnect with their emotions

Posted on November 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

From Sharpbrains.com

Vet­er­ans learn to use yoga and med­i­ta­tion exer­cises to recon­nect with their emo­tions(Wis­con­sin State Journal):

“Rich Low of Madi­son served as an infantry offi­cer in the Army in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, lead­ing some 280 com­bat mis­sions. When he came back from the ser­vice, he didn’t think his expe­ri­ence affected him in any major way. He had night­mares, and he star­tled eas­ily, but he chalked that up to just some­thing vet­er­ans live with.

Then he enrolled in a study he ini­tially wrote off as “just some hip­pie thing,” where he learned about yoga breath­ing and med­i­ta­tion. A year later, Low, 30, sums up his expe­ri­ence with two words: “It works.”

That’s the idea behind the study com­ing from The Cen­ter for Inves­ti­gat­ing Healthy Minds, at the Wais­man Cen­ter on the UW-Madison cam­pus. Researchers there, includ­ing asso­ciate sci­en­tist Emma Sep­pala, believe some­thing as sim­ple as breath­ing can change the lives of vet­er­ans return­ing from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Link to Study: The effect of mindfulness-based ther­apy on anx­i­ety and depres­sion: A meta-analytic review (J Con­sult Clin Psychol).

Abstract:

  • OBJECTIVE: Although mindfulness-based ther­apy has become a pop­u­lar treat­ment, lit­tle is known about its effi­cacy. There­fore, our objec­tive was to con­duct an effect size analy­sis of this pop­u­lar inter­ven­tion for anx­i­ety and mood symp­toms in clin­i­cal samples.
  • METHOD:  We con­ducted a lit­er­a­ture search using PubMed, PsycINFO, the Cochrane Library, and man­ual searches. Our meta-analysis was based on 39 stud­ies total­ing 1,140 par­tic­i­pants receiv­ing mindfulness-based ther­apy for a range of con­di­tions, includ­ing can­cer, gen­er­al­ized anx­i­ety dis­or­der, depres­sion, and other psy­chi­atric or med­ical conditions.
  • RESULTS:  Effect size esti­mates sug­gest that mindfulness-based ther­apy was mod­er­ately effec­tive for improv­ing anx­i­ety (Hedges’s g = 0.63) and mood symp­toms (Hedges’s g = 0.59) from pre– to post treat­ment in the over­all sam­ple. In patients with anx­i­ety and mood dis­or­ders, this inter­ven­tion was asso­ci­ated with effect sizes (Hedges’s g) of 0.97 and 0.95 for improv­ing anx­i­ety and mood symp­toms, respec­tively. These effect sizes were robust, were unre­lated to pub­li­ca­tion year or num­ber of treat­ment ses­sions, and were main­tained over follow-up.
  • CONCLUSIONS:  These results sug­gest that mindfulness-based ther­apy is a promis­ing inter­ven­tion for treat­ing anx­i­ety and mood prob­lems in clin­i­cal populations.

To learn more, enjoy these related arti­cles on Stress and Med­i­ta­tion.

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Posted in Health, Meditation, personal yoga practice, Research

Migraine Miseries Push Patients to Ways of Coping

Posted on July 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

From The New York Times

By TARA PARKER-POPE

The news that the presidential candidate Michele Bachmann suffers from severe migraines has touched off a national discussion about a surprisingly common disorder that is little understood and often undertreated.

Migraine patients are coming forward with their stories. And while each one is different, they have two common threads: suffering and trying to cope.

For some, a migraine represents throbbing head pain and nausea so severe they retreat to a darkened room for a day or more. For others, it’s about a scary moment, driving on the highway when a migraine-induced aura or vision change forces them to pull over.

“Imagine someone having driven a nail straight through your head,” said Craig Partridge, 50, chief scientist for a high-tech research company in East Lansing, Mich., who began having migraines in his late teens. “And then they periodically tap on it to remind you it’s there. It’s that painful.”

More than 10 percent of adults and children suffer from migraine — which is three times as common in women and girls as in men and boys — and the Migraine Research Foundation reports that nearly a quarter of households are affected. The World Health Organization ranks migraine among the top 20 most debilitating health conditions; more than 90 percent of sufferers are unable to work or function normally during an attack, which can last for hours or even days.

Some migraine sufferers say the attacks are so debilitating they couldn’t imagine taking on a job with significant responsibility. But others note that years of experience and new drug treatments have helped them find ways to cope. Some say the condition forced them to take better care of themselves and adopt healthful behaviors, like getting enough sleep and learning to manage stress.

Mr. Partridge has learned to avoid caffeine and bright lights, and is vigilant about wearing sunglasses in strong sunlight. Years of taking ibuprofen to treat headaches led to an ulcer. Eventually, he learned that a magnesium supplement reduced the frequency of his headaches, and now he gets only about three a year.

“As far as I can tell, everyone is a little different,” he said. “Some people have auras, but I never had auras. I get tunnel vision. My tongue starts to get heavy and I have trouble talking.”

Kat Smith, a 47-year-old mother of three in Bryn Mawr, Pa., remembers her teenage brother suffering terribly from migraines, but she never experienced them until a bike accident in her 20s. Then, after the birth of her son, she had migraines “regularly and fiercely” about 12 times a month. She discovered that small amounts of alcohol and vigorous physical activity acted as a trigger.

“I was a fairly carefree person, but I became rigid, very disciplined with myself,” she said. “It seemed I had to eliminate things that other people associated with joy. I had to reconstruct my life as a person of migraine after accepting that these weren’t going to go away.”

She adapted, giving up ice hockey and aerobics and switching to yoga. But sometimes she pushes her limits. This weekend she took part in a vigorous dance class and was punished with a migraine.

“I’ll do something incredibly vigorous and physical, and it will feel so good,” she said. “That night I will get a massive migraine.”

For many patients, including Ms. Smith, a class of migraine drugs called triptans have been a godsend, helping to cut short the pain. Triptans work by causing blood vessels in the brain to constrict and change blood flow, and can often stop a migraine completely or reduce its severity if taken in the early minutes of an attack.

Other patients take daily treatments to prevent migraine from setting in. Barbara Thompson, a 59-year-old communications specialist in Manhattan, uses Topamax, a seizure drug that has been shown to prevent migraine. An attack sometimes “breaks through” despite the daily dose, and on those days she uses a triptan drug.

“Often I get them when I’m at work,” she said. “I find that I get more quiet, and I have to focus more intently on what I’m doing. It’s a more internal day — I don’t have a better way of putting it.”

In a video that went viral, the television reporter Serene Branson babbled gibberish last winter during a live report from the Grammy Awards. At first, it seemed as if she were having a stroke on live television, but her doctor later concluded that a complex migraine had rendered her unable to form words.

Some migraine sufferers, including Ms. Bachmann, experience pain so severe they go the emergency room. But a recent review of emergency room doctors in Ontario found that patients were rarely treated with the proper drugs for migraine, according to a report last month in the journal Pain Research & Management.

The data suggests that more education is needed.

“If it’s not well controlled with the right combination of preventative or acute therapy, it can be very disabling,” said Dr. Satnam Nijjar, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins Headache Center. “It’s probably the most common cause for time missed from work in the U.S.”

Robert Dalton, executive director of the National Headache Foundation in Chicago, says that while migraines can be impairing, the larger problem is that many sufferers aren’t getting proper medical care.

“What we want to make sure people understand,” he said, “is that it’s a debilitating disease when it’s not managed properly.”

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Posted in Health, Research

Grasping for Any Way to Prevent Alzheimer’s

Posted on July 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

From The New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK
Is there a way to prevent Alzheimer’s disease? Last week, a study presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Paris suggested there might be, something that would give hope to millions who worry that one day they may be struggling with dementia.

The new study, by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, estimated how many Alzheimer’s cases might be attributable to certain behaviors or conditions: physical inactivity, smoking, depression, low education, hypertension, obesity and diabetes.

The authors used a mathematical model to surmise that these behaviors and conditions, all of which can be modified, are responsible for about half of the roughly 5.3 million Alzheimer’s cases in the United States and 34 million cases worldwide.

And they calculated that if people addressed these risks — by exercising, quitting smoking, increasing their education or losing weight, for example — a significant number of Alzheimer’s cases could be prevented. Reducing the prevalence of these risk factors by 10 percent, the researchers estimated, could prevent 1.1 million cases worldwide; reducing these risk factors by 25 percent could prevent more than three million cases.

The operative word was “could.” As the researchers pointed out, there is not yet scientific proof that any of these risk factors in fact cause Alzheimer’s. Only if they are shown to do so could the new analysis be considered a practical recipe for preventing the disease.

“These things are not definitive,” said one author, Dr. Kristine Yaffe, a professor of psychiatry, neurology and epidemiology. “We’re assuming that these are sort of causally related to the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s, but unless you have a great trial, you just don’t know.”

But while experts may have understood that distinction, not everyone else did. Some headlines made things sound more certain: “7 Things You Can Do to Fight Alzheimer’s” or “7 Steps to Prevent Alzheimer’s.”

In an editorial accompanying the study, both published in the journal Lancet Neurology, Dr. Laura Fratiglioni, director of the Aging Research Center at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, suggested that the report was valuable, but said that the estimates “could be regarded as only theoretical” until more rigorous research is done.

“We have been able to identify some possible preventive factors,” Dr. Fratiglioni said, “but we do not have the final answer because we do not have the experimental studies.”

Indeed, research on prevention of Alzheimer’s is in its infancy. It has only been since the 1980s that dementia has not been considered a symptom of normal aging. And studies on preventing Alzheimer’s can be complicated and costly, especially the randomized controlled trials that provide the strongest evidence. Such trials have to follow people for years, and isolating individual risk factors — separating obesity from hypertension, diabetes, nutrition and physical inactivity, for instance — is challenging.

Last year, a National Institutes of Health panel of experts with no vested interest in Alzheimer’s research concluded that “no evidence of even moderate scientific quality exists to support the association of any modifiable factor (such as nutritional supplements, herbal preparations, dietary factors, prescription or nonprescription drugs, social or economic factors, medical conditions, toxins or environmental exposures) with reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease.”

Most research, the panel found, involved observational studies, showing that people who did or did not get Alzheimer’s had certain characteristics beforehand, but not whether the characteristics were causal.

The panel found the strongest evidence for only one conclusion: that the herb gingko biloba does not prevent Alzheimer’s. There was moderate evidence that neither vitamin E nor drugs called cholinesterase inhibitors, used to treat dementia symptoms, decrease risk of Alzheimer’s. And there was moderate evidence that the gene ApoE4 significantly increases Alzheimer’s risk, as does menopause therapy with estrogens and progestins.

Evidence for or against any other causal factor was poor, often because studies were small, used vague or changing definitions, or did not rigorously monitor what subjects were doing.

“We debated for hours and hours and hours how to write the report, because certainly we didn’t want it to be the carrier of bad news,” said Dr. Martha Daviglus, the panel’s chairwoman and a preventive medicine expert at Northwestern University. But “we wanted the public to realize that at this point nothing that people can sell to them is proven to work.”

Many members of the Alzheimer’s community were stung, considering the panel’s conclusions a “glass half empty,” said William Thies, the Alzheimer’s Association’s chief medical and scientific officer. “We would agree that we haven’t proven any of these risk factors, but there’s data that are pretty good for some of them. And in a world where we have lots of Alzheimer’s disease and no definitive medical intervention, prevention strategies that are based on lifestyle changes are certainly attractive.”

Dr. Yaffe and her colleague Deborah Barnes excluded risk factors like nutrition or brain exercise because they believed research was not solid enough. They used a more elastic threshold to evaluate research than the N.I.H. panel because, Dr. Yaffe said, the panel “didn’t quite do the field justice.”

Their model weighed the strength of existing research and how widespread the risk factors were. In the United States, they estimated that 1.1 million Alzheimer’s cases, or 21 percent, may be linked to physical inactivity. Fifteen percent may owe to depression, 11 percent to smoking, 8 percent to midlife hypertension, 7 percent to obesity, 7 percent to low education and 3 percent to diabetes.

Their estimates for the risk factors worldwide differed because some behaviors and conditions are more common than in the United States. So low education accounted for 19 percent, or 6.5 million cases, worldwide, while physical inactivity accounted for 13 percent and obesity 2 percent.

Dr. John W. Williams Jr., a professor of medicine at Duke University who led an analysis of Alzheimer’s prevention research for the N.I.H. panel, said studies like Dr. Yaffe’s can be informative “when we don’t have other evidence” and can help shapers of public policy “make decisions about where to invest to reduce risk.”

But he said: “What should individuals do with it? Probably not much.”

Among the limitations, he said, was that some risk factors, like physical inactivity and obesity, “are darn hard to change.”

And does a risk factor like depression cause Alzheimer’s — or is it the other way around?

Still, everyone agrees these risks merit attention for other reasons: preventing cancer or heart disease, improving overall health.

“It’s good if you can do it, but not in the name of Alzheimer’s,” Dr. Daviglus said. “But maybe we will find out that by doing this for other diseases, we are also doing it for Alzheimer’s.”

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Posted in Health, Research