A meditative practice known as Sudarshan Kriya yoga — includes a series of sequential, rhythm-specific breathing exercises designed to bring participants into a deep, restful state.
An 8-week breathing-based meditation intervention significantly improved depression and anxiety symptoms in patients who did not fully respond to antidepressants, compared with patients who did not participate in the intervention.
The findings of the small study are published online in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
“With such a large portion of patients who do not fully respond to antidepressants, it’s important we find new avenues that work best for each person to beat their depression,” said researcher Anup Sharma, MD, PhD, a neuropsychiatry research fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. “Here, we have a promising, lower-cost therapy that could potentially serve as an effective, nondrug approach for patients battling this disease.”
For the study, researchers randomly assigned 13 patients to 8 weeks of Sudarshan Kriya yoga and 12 patients to a control group. All 25 participants had major depressive disorder and were still depressed at baseline despite undergoing 8 or more weeks of antidepressant therapy, researchers reported. Patients in the control group were offered the yoga intervention at the study’s end.
In the first week of the study, the treatment group completed 6 sessions on Sudarshan Kriya yoga, yoga postures, sitting meditation, and stress education. For the subsequent weeks, they attended weekly Sudarshan Kriya yoga sessions and practiced the technique at home.
Patients assigned to the breathing-based meditation, researchers found, had a significantly greater improvement in total scores on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale at the end of the study, compared with patients in the control group. The yoga group improved scores by an average 10.27 points, while the control group showed no improvements.
The results suggest both feasibility and promise of Sudarshan Kriya yoga as an adjunctive intervention for patients who do not respond to antidepressants for major depressive disorder, researchers concluded.
“The next step in this research,” Dr. Sharma said, “is to conduct a larger study evaluating how this intervention impacts brain structure and function in patients who have major depression.”