Yoga can help cope with post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms

A new study has revealed that symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be reduced with help of “yogic breathing.”

Yoga can help cope with post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have shown that a breathing-based meditation practice called Sudarshan Kriya Yoga can be an effective treatment for PTSD, which causes intrusive memories, heightened anxiety, and personality changes.

The hallmark of PTSD is hyperarousal, which can be defined as overreacting to innocuous stimuli, and is one aspect of the autonomic nervous system, the system that controls the beating of the heart and other body functions. It governs one’s ability to respond to his or her environment.

Sudarshan Kriya Yoga is a practice of controlled breathing that directly affects the autonomic nervous system. The team was interested in the practice because of its focus on manipulating the breath, and how that in turn may have consequences for the autonomic nervous system and specifically, hyperarousal.

The tests included measuring eye-blink startle magnitude and respiration rates in response to stimuli such as a noise burst in the laboratory. Respiration is one of the functions controlled by the autonomic nervous system; the eye-blink startle rate is an involuntary response that can be used to measure one component of hyperarousal. These two measurements reflect aspects of mental health because they affect how an individual regulates emotion.

The CIHM study included 21 soldiers: an active group of 11 and a control group of 10. Those who received the one-week training in yogic breathing showed lower anxiety, reduced respiration rates and fewer PTSD symptoms.

Sudarshan Kriya Yoga has already been shown to increase optimism in college students, and reduce stress and anxiety in people suffering from depression, and hence it may be an effective way to decrease suffering and, quite possibly, the incidence of suicide among veterans.

Source: zee news


75% seasonal, pandemic flu sufferers have no symptoms

Researchers have said that around 1 in 5 of the population were infected in both recent outbreaks of seasonal flu and the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, but just 23 per cent of these infections caused symptoms.

The Flu Watch study tracked five successive cohorts of households across England over six influenza seasons between 2006 and 2011. The researchers calculated nationally representative estimates of the incidence of influenza infection, the proportion of infections that were symptomatic, and the proportion of symptomatic infections that led to medical attention.

Participants provided blood samples before and after each season for influenza serology, and all participating households were contacted weekly to identify any cases of cough, cold, sore throat or ‘flu-like illness’. Any person reporting such symptoms was asked to submit a nasal swab on day 2 of illness to test for a variety of respiratory viruses using Real-Time, Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) technology.

The results show that on average 18per cent of the unvaccinated community were infected with influenza each winter season-19per cent during prepandemic seasons and 18per cent during the 2009 pandemic. But most (77per cent) of these infections showed no symptoms, and only around 17per cent of people with PCR-confirmed influenza visited their doctor. Compared with some seasonal flu strains, the 2009 pandemic strain caused substantially milder symptoms.

The study has been published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal.
source: zee news