Professor Calls for Yoga Research Improvement.

There is still much work to be done in evaluating the effectiveness of yoga to improve health, A. Rani Elwy explained at the 2016 International Congress of Integrative Medicine and Health (ICIMH) on May 19.

Elwy, associate professor of health law, policy & management, gave two presentations at the congress, one addressing current gaps and limitations in the literature on yoga to improve health and the other discussing what will be necessary to advance yoga research.

During her presentations, Elwy explained that most of the literature on yoga interventions fails to describe the essential components of the yoga used in those interventions. Hatha yoga, the branch of yoga most popular in the West, includes a variety of forms—Iyengar, Ashtanga, Integral, Kundalini, Viniyoga, Bikram, Baptiste, Kripalu—leaving the results of these broadly described “yoga interventions” difficult to evaluate or replicate.

“You would never see a weight management intervention described only as ‘a weight management intervention’ in peer-reviewed, published literature,” Elwy says.

As part of a team led by University of Connecticut psychology professor Crystal Park on an NIH National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health grant, Elwy evaluated the existing evidence base in yoga research and helped create the Essential Properties of Yoga Questionnaire (EPYQ), a translational measure to help describe yoga interventions in a standardized way.

“We want to see yoga as a preferred health intervention alongside any medication or any form of treatment such as physical therapy or psychotherapy,” Elwy says. “It is only through improved research rigor that the evidence of yoga’s effectiveness will be realized.”

The 2016 International Congress on Integrative Medicine and Health (ICIMH) took place in Las Vegas, Nevada, May 17 through 20. Convened by the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health, ICIMH’s mission is to foster the development of new collaborations and to strengthen existing partnerships within the field of integrative medicine and health.

—Michelle Samuels