Yoga Can Help In Better Migraine Treatment Than Medication Alone, Research Suggests

Health News: Researchers from the American Academy of Neurology found that adding yoga to your regularly prescribed migraine treatment may be better than medication alone. Yoga may help people with migraines have headaches that happen less often, don’t last as long and are less painful.

Researchers hired 114 people (ages between 18 – 50) who had episodic migraine. Participants experienced 4 to 14 headaches per month and were randomly assigned to two groups: medication-only or yoga plus medication.

Those in the yoga group practised yoga including breathing and relaxation exercises for one hour, 3 days a week for a month under the supervision of a yoga instructor. Later the participants practised yoga independently for 5 days a week over the next two months.

Both groups received on time medications along with counseling about lifestyle changes like diet, sleep to better manage migraines. All the participants kept a track of their headaches and its severity. Participants kept a log about how long their headaches lasted, how severe they were and medications they took.

The study findings revealed that participants in both the medication-only group as well as the yoga group benefited, but the benefit was higher in the yoga group in all areas, including headache frequency, pain intensity, use of medications as well as how much migraine interfered with daily life.

The study findings were published in the online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

“Our results show that yoga can reduce not just the pain, but also the treatment cost of migraines,” said Rohit Bhatia. “That can be a real game changer, especially for people who struggle to afford their medication. Medications are usually prescribed first, and some can be expensive.”

To Know More You May Refer To

Kumar, A., Bhatia, R., Sharma, G., Dhanlika, D., Vishnubhatla, S., Singh, R. K., Dash, D., Tripathi, M., & Srivastava, M. P. (2020). Effect of yoga as add-on therapy in migraine (Contain). Neurology, 94(21), e2203-e2212. https://doi.org/10.1212/wnl.0000000000009473