The Effects of Yoga on Cardiovascular Risk Factors among Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a fastest evolving metabolic disorder and India houses second highest number of patients with diabetes after China. Cardiovascular diseases are the major cause of mortality among patients with T2DM. Yoga is an ancient Indian practice that proves to be effective for patients with diabetes. The present systematic review and meta-analysis has been conducted to see the benefits of yoga on blood pressure, lipid profile, and anthropometric measures among patients with T2DM. The articles were extracted from three databases - PubMed, The Cochrane library, and Google scholar. Only English language articles, with PEDro score≥6, were included in the current study. The duplicates were removed using Mendeley. Fourteen randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and three 3 non-RCTs were included in the analysis. The meta-analysis was done using Review Manager 5.3. The results reveal that yoga is effect in improving blood pressure (P<0.01), lipid profile (P<0.01) except HDL (P=0.06), and anthropometric measures (P<0.01) except waist-hip ratio (P=0.79). Heterogeneity was also high for most of the variables. It may be concluded from the results that the yoga is effective in improving of blood pressure, lipid profile, and anthropometric measures. However, high heterogeneity sought the need of more high quality RCTs to affirm these findings.