Yoga for Family Caregivers of Alzheimers Disease Patient

Federal University of São Paulo

Status: Completed

Conditions: Compassion; Anxiety; Stress

Treatments: Behavioral: yoga and compassion meditation program

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT02563483

yoga caregivers

Details and patient eligibility

About

This study evaluates the effects of the practice of yoga in combination with compassion meditation on the quality of life, attention, vitality and self-compassion of family caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Full description

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive brain disorder that involves the loss of reasoning, memory, language and the ability to live independently. Thus, patients who suffer from this disease often require care from another person and must adapt to ensure their health, functional capacity and safety. Caregivers have a poor quality of life due to the physical and psychological burden of caregiving. Such physical, psychological, social and financial burden can increase the risk of death. Within this scenario, techniques such as yoga and meditation have emerged as low-cost interventions that offer little or no risk to the practitioners. Yoga seeks to develop health and attention through physical postures, breathing exercises and formal meditative practices.

Enrollment: 46 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• be a family caregiver of Alzheimer disease patient
• age over 18 years
• completed at least the primary education level
• at least at the phase of stress resistance according to Lipp's Inventory of Stress Symptoms for adults

Exclusion criteria

• patient with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
• alcohol use (more than 5 drinks per week) or use of drugs-of-abuse;
• suffer from Cushing's syndrome
• under treatment with topical, nasal or any form of steroids within the last 30 days
• practice yoga, meditation or similar techniques

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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46 participants in 2 patient groups

Yoga and compassion meditation program

Experimental group

Description:

The duration of this group was 8 weeks. The program included sessions 3 times per week, with each session lasting 1 hour and 15 minutes. The volunteers performed yoga classes composed of "asana" (poses), "pranayama" (breathing exercise) and meditation.

Treatment:

Behavioral: yoga and compassion meditation program

control

No Intervention group

Description:

this group was a non treatment group.