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German researchers find Yoga helpful for patients with Ulcerative Colitis
 
A team of Germany’s University of Duisburg-Essen researchers found that patients with ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease, assigned to 12 supervised 90-minute weekly sessions of yoga, had a greater increase in quality of life and reduced activity of their colitis; according to a release issued on April five.
 
The findings suggest that regular yoga may be a valuable adjunct to conventional medical therapies for ulcerative colitis, release of Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics, an international journal of gastroenterology and hepatology, indicates.
 
Yoga can be considered as a safe and effective ancillary intervention for patients with ulcerative colitis and impaired quality of life, the study concluded.
 
“Many people use yoga to increase their quality of life. Our study suggests that it might be worthwhile to consider yoga as part of a multimodal integrative approach for treating ulcerative colitis,” said Professor Holger Cramer, lead author of this Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics study.
 
This clinical trial randomly assigned 77 patients with ulcerative colitis in clinical remission but impaired quality of life to yoga.
 
Meanwhile, distinguished Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada today, called this clinical trial looking into yoga intervention for patients with ulcerative colitis a “step in the positive direction”. Zed urged all major world universities to explore various benefits yoga offered.
 
Yoga, referred as “a living fossil”, was a mental and physical discipline, for everybody to share and benefit from, whose traces went back to around 2,000 BCE to Indus Valley civilization, Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, noted.
 
Rajan Zed further said that yoga, although introduced and nourished by Hinduism, was a world heritage and liberation powerhouse to be utilized by all. According to Patanjali who codified it in Yoga Sutra, yoga was a methodical effort to attain perfection, through the control of the different elements of human nature, physical and psychical.
 
According to US National Institutes of Health, yoga may help one to feel more relaxed, be more flexible, improve posture, breathe deeply, and get rid of stress. According to a “2016 Yoga in America Study”, about 37 million Americans (which included many celebrities) now practice yoga; and yoga is strongly correlated with having a positive self image.  Yoga was the repository of something basic in the human soul and psyche, Zed added.