Clinical yoga trial aim to improve quality of life at advanced stages of oral cancer

Background Being a holistic approach, yoga is getting popular in the clinical scenario as alternate or integrative medicine. Aims: In the present work, we proposed that yoga could synergize the conventional treatment of oral cancer by reducing psychological distress, thus improving patients' quality of life. Methods Being a pilot study, we have recruited 26 patients with advanced stages of oral cancer. One group is taken as control which does not perform yoga, whereas patients in the experimental group performed yoga for 1 hour per day/5 days per week for 3 months. Results We evaluated the quality of life between the control and experimental group using EORTC-QLQ-H&N-35 and found that certain domains of quality of life showed significant improvement. Conclusion The present study revealed that yoga, if administered along with conventional treatment in an integrative manner, can help in improving the patients' quality of life. Further studies that could relate the yoga with symptoms scale, recurrence and disease-free survival could be proved of immense importance in the management of the disease.