Research on pregnancy yoga

By Sarah Wickham (see sarawickham.com)

A reminder that researchers looking at the effectiveness of prenatal yoga on delivery outcomes undertook a meta-analysis with interesting results.

They, "identified that yoga improved vaginal delivery, decreased premature delivery and birth weight of newborns, shorten the labor duration." (Rong et al 2020).

A note about the birth weight finding before anyone asks. This doesn't mean that the babies were compromised or didn't grow well. The average weight of the babies in the yoga and non-yoga groups was within normal limits and the researchers seem to be suggesting that this might mean that women who did yoga in these studies had babies who were less likely to be affected by gestational diabetes, but this needs more research.

The authors concluded that "Prenatal yoga is an effective complementary medicine to improve delivery outcomes and not to increase the risk to the fetus, which is worth recommending to pregnant women.

Not all of the studies involved in this meta-analysis were of high quality, but it's great that this gives us some evidence and a better idea of what we need to look at in future research.

You can see the original research at https://www.sciencedirect.com/.../pii/S1744388119308503