Women in the menopause experience a range of symptoms – for one in five they will be severe while a lucky three in five will suffer only mildly. I’m talking about bloating, aches and pains, headaches, hot flushes, night sweats, tiredness, insomnia, weight gain, depression, irritability, forgetfulness, lack of concentration, the amount of times you need the loo and painful sex. Quite a list! And they can really interfere with the quality of your life. But could yoga be the key to relief?
Since oestrogen deficiency is the cause of menopausal symptoms, hormone replacement therapy is the most effective treatment. No other treatment comes close. All kinds of alternative remedies are recommended, but very few have been proven to work. And if they do work, they’re rarely more efficient than taking a placebo or dummy pill. So, women who are reluctant to take hormone treatment are always looking around for something more natural that will help them.
A new and very beautiful study, in a scientific sense, from India, has shown that yoga could help you a lot if you’re one of these women. And you don’t have to pay for expensive yoga sessions. You can enrol in a local yoga class that will cost you no more than £5.
So it’s available to most. The women who took part in the study were scored on 11 menopausal symptoms, which covered physical, emotional, sleep, joint and muscle complaints and psychological symptoms like depression, irritability and tiredness. Bladder symptoms and sexual problems were also tracked.
One group of those studied performed yoga on a daily basis including breathing techniques and meditation, which sounds like the yoga I practise. Alongside a control group, both groups filled in a questionnaire to analyse changes in their symptoms at the end of the study. When the two groups were analysed, the women who’d been practising yoga were found to have significantly lower scores on all the symptom scales.
There was a significant difference in the total score and the scores of all the separate tests in the yoga group. With no improvement in the control group’s symptoms, it proves, in my mind, yoga’s effectiveness in fighting menopausal symptoms.