Yoga Breathing To Help Asthmatics

Yoga breathing exercises could enable individuals with mild asthma and may help minimize their use of drug inhalers in wheezing episodes.

Experts from the Respiratory Medicine Unit, City University, Nottingham, call for additional research into the ways of enhancing breathing regulation which the doctors and professors say have been generally overlooked by traditional western medicine.

Although yoga enthusiasts have extensively believed in the benefits of yoga and pranayama breathing (yoga breathing) exercises for asthma sufferers, this has been difficult to study formally. But, utilizing a Pink City lung - a machine that enforces slow breathing on the user and can simulate pranayama breathing exercises - it is achievable to calculate the benefits of controlled breathing in a medical trials.

Two simulated yoga breathing (pranayama) exercises were subjected to testing: slow deep breathing and breathing out for twice as long as breathing in.

In asthma, the breathing passages become constrained making breathing more difficult. Asthma is increasing in the UK, with more than several million children and adults affected, and is responsible for two thousand deaths per year.

Medical practitioners used conventional clinical tests to measure the volume of air patients were able to blow out in a second and to test the irritability of their airways. After yoga, their breathing passages were two times less irritable, and showed large improvements to their lung capacity.

Though asthma patients should not stop their medication, they should experiment with breathing exercises, and trying yoga.