Practicing yoga may help women lower inflammatory-inducing certain compounds in their blood to ward off conditions like heart disease, stroke, type-2 diabetes and arthritis.
Researchers at Ohio State University have found that doing yoga helped reduce the amount of the cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) compound in the blood.
IL-6 is an important part of the body’s inflammatory response and has been implicated a host of age-related debilitating diseases. Researchers say that using yoga to reduce inflammation may provide substantial short-and long-term health benefits.
"In addition to having lower levels of inflammation before they were stressed, we also saw lower inflammatory responses to stress among the expert yoga practitioners in the study," said the study’s lead author Janice Kiecolt-Glaser. "Hopefully, this means that people can eventually learn to respond less strongly to stressors in their everyday lives by using yoga and other stress-reducing modalities."
The study consisted of 50 women with an average age of 41 who took part in a series of stress-inducing tasks followed by either short yoga sessions, walking on a treadmill or watching short, boring videos.
Researchers found that the participants who did yoga after the stressors had lower levels of IL-6.
They say that their findings prove that small lifestyle changes, like doing yoga a few times each week, can lead to positive long-term health benefits.
source: drcutler
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