Yoga Breathing and Relaxation for Asthma in Young Adults

What’s This Research About?

Asthma

Bronchial asthma, as defined by the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA), is a condition where airways get inflamed over time. This inflammation causes breathing problems like shortness of breath, chest tightness, wheezing, and coughing, which can come and go. Asthma can also make it harder to breathe out fully.

Asthma attacks can be scary, leading to panic, and the worry about when the next attack might happen can make people anxious. Some folks with asthma might also feel down because standard treatments don’t always fix the root issue, making it an ongoing struggle.

Prevalence

The World Health Organization’s survey found that many young adults have bronchial asthma. Doctors have officially diagnosed asthma in 4.3% of young adults aged 18 to 45 worldwide. About 4.5% of them are taking asthma medication, and 8.6% experienced wheezing in the past year.

In 2016, asthma caused around 420,000 deaths. A study from 2018 showed that for teenagers, 77% of asthma goes undiagnosed. This means they suffer from asthma attacks without getting any relief for their breathing problems, even temporarily.

Yoga for Asthma

The effect of yoga on asthma symptoms has been studied since the mid-1980s. In many research studies, a big issue is that some people who initially join the study end up dropping out, typically between 10% to 20% of the participants. This dropout rate is one of the barriers in examining the effectiveness of yoga interventions.

With this in mind, this research looked at a shorter 30-minute yoga program. They share what happened when 30 young adults, aged 18 to 30, with mild to moderate asthma, practiced this yoga program for 90 days. They documented how it affected their quality of life, anxiety, depression, and how well their lungs worked.

Their main goal was to check if people’s quality of life, anxiety, depression, and how well their lungs work would get better after 90 days of doing this yoga program. They believed there would be noticeable improvements in all of these areas after completing the program.