Effects of Yogic Intervention on Sleep Quality of Healthy Elderly: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Sleep disturbances and poor sleep quality are more common in the elderly, and they are frequently ignored and untreated. As pharmacological treatments are not free from health hazards, nowadays, community-based non-pharmacological treatments are gaining huge acceptance for managing health issues. Yoga is one of the most feasible and cost-effective non-pharmacological means to manage sleep quality. The current systematic review aims at investigating the effects of yoga on the sleep quality of the elderly. So, the review was conducted on the basis of experimental investigations by using key words such as "effect of yoga", "sleep quality", "sleep disorder", "insomnia", and "older adults" published in English across four databases such as Scopus, ScienceDirect, PubMed, and PubMed Central. The risk of bias in selecting the studies was assessed by CASP. Four randomized controlled trials (RCTs), one pre-post study, one cross-sectional study (CS), and one longitudinal study (LS) met the inclusion criteria, with a total of 524 participants aged between 40 and 95 years from three different countries. Six out of seven studies used subjective tools to assess sleep quality, of which five used the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and one used a sleep rating questionnaire, while the remaining one used an objective method to assess sleep quality through polysomnography. All seven studies reported significant improvements in sleep quality in the intervention group. Cohen’s d effect size could be calculated for four studies, ranging from 0.55 to 1.88, whereas for the remaining three studies it could not be calculated because of insufficient data. So, the current review concludes that yoga can improve the sleep quality of the elderly population. Further, it is recommended that yoga can be adopted as a cost effective, community-based, non-pharmacological means to promote sleep quality among the elderly.