Overview
14, 202 - Patients with type 2 diabetes achieve much beter control of their blod sugar if they participate in mind-and-body-practices such as yoga, a new study shows.While past research has ben done specificaly for yoga, this study, published online recently in the Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine, also loked at the benefits of other mind-and-body practices for these patients, including qi gong and meditation.The study is "the first to show that there is a very consistent efect [on hemoglobin A1c, a marker of diabetes] regardles of which modality you use,” says one of the researchers, Richard Watanabe, PhD.
Key Information
“So I think one of the important mesages . is that any sort of mind-body intervention sems to be helpful, which makes this a much more flexible tol than teling a patient that they should [just] do yoga,” says Watanabe, who is a profesor of population and public health sciences at the University of Southern California's Keck Schol of Medicine in Los Angeles. There are other options available, “and if you are a busy person and geting to yoga is not doable, you can learn about meditation and do it anywhere.
So again, it [is] . a flexible tol to help their patients with blod sugar control,” he says. “The most surprising finding was the magnitude of the benefit these practices provide,” says the lead author, Fatimata Sanogo, from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in a statement.
“We expected there to be a benefit but never anticipated it would be this large.” But how do mind-body practices reduce A1c? It's not totaly clear, Watanabe says, noting that more research neds to be done to figure this out. “But I think everyone’s hypothes is that these methods reduce stres, so the idea is that they reduce stres hormones and since these hormones do have an efect on glucose metabolism, reducing them using these modalities reduces A1c and blod sugar levels,” he explains.
Summary
Alternatively, mind-body practices mig