Trends towards Drugless Therapy in Breast Cancer Patients with Yoga Techniques: A Mini Review
Author : Indu Sharma, Shuchi Mohan and Guru Deo
Abstract :
Introduction: Cancer is a disease in which some of the body’s cells grow uncontrollably and spread to other parts of the body. When cells grow old or become damaged, they die, and new cells take their place, but sometimes abnormal or damaged cells grow and multiply. These cells may form tumors, which are lumps of tissue. Tumors can be cancerous or not cancerous (benign). Cancerous tumors spread into nearby tissues and can travel to another body parts to form new tumors through a process called metastasis.
Yoga practices have shown beneficial effects on people suffering from side effects of breast cancer but its mechanism still remains unclear. Hence, the current review is carried out with the aim to evaluate and find the mechanism of effectivity of Yoga practices as complementary therapy for patients suffering from negative effects of modern treatment of breast cancer.
Material and Methods: The articles for this systematic review were obtained by searching through the PubMed, Google Scholar, Web of Science, Publon, Cochrane. The keywords yoga and cancer, cancer and stress, stress and yoga, yoga and breast cancer were used while accessing these databases. It was tried to get full paper related to the topic. If paper was not available online freely emailing request was sent to concerned author for the same to get that article.
Result: Out of 86 article 4 were selected for final review. Among these 1 is on cognitive problems related to breast cancer women immediately after treatment. Another one is on perceived stress, sleep, diurnal cortisol and natural killer (NK) cell count in patients with metastatic cancer. Two studies are on breast cancer patients in their II and III stage. The one article is a comparative study on self-reported depression scores in breast cancer patients undergoing conventional treatment. The other research is also focussed to know the effect of yoga on psychological distress, fatigue, insomnia, appetite, nausea, vomiting, dyspnoea and pain while patients were undergoing radiotherapy.
Conclusion: The current review showed that yogic practices are effective to manage breast cancer along with ongoing treatment. Yoga practices will help to overcome the stress born out of being confirmed with breast cancer. Yoga practices are also beneficial to improve the quality of life if practiced regularly. There are still lack of promising literature scientifically explored with clinical trials where breast cancer patients are given one aspect of Yoga techniques. Mechanism based research required with large number of samples with and without modern treatment therapy along with drugless therapy including Yoga.
Keywords :
Yoga, stress, cancer, breast cancer, quality of life, drugless therapy
