Effects of Yoga on Dysmenorrhea: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials

Objectives: To assess the evidence for the effectiveness of yoga in the management of menstrual pain and the symptoms associated with dysmenorrhea. Methods: A search was conducted using CINAHL, the Cochrane library, Embase, PsycINFO, PubMed, and KoreaMed electronic databases to identify randomized controlled trials (RCTs) reported effects of yogic intervention on dysmenorrhea published in any language between January 1966 and October 2014. Quality assessment was conducted using the Cochrane risk of bias tool. Results: Two potential trials were identified of which two were included in the review. Quality critical appraisal had low or moderate risk of bias. The available data could only be included as a narrative description. A significant difference was observed between experimental and control groups in pain intensity and pain duration (p<0.05) and thyroid-stimulating hormone (p<0.002), follicle-stimulating hormone (p<0.02), luteinizing hormone (p<0.001), and prolactin (p<0.02) were decreased significantly in the experimental group, compared with the control group. Conclusions: There is evidence from two RCTs that yoga interventions may be favorable effective for dysmenorrhea. However the findings should be interpreted with caution due to the number of small RCTs and quality limitation partly. Therefore further high quality RCTs are required to investigate the hypothesis that yoga alleviates menstrual pain and the symptoms associated with dysmenorrhea, to confirm and further comprehend the effects of standardized yoga programs in dysmenorrhea.