Effect of add on Yoga therapy on social cognition in schizophrenia

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder affecting young adults with a lifetime newlineprevalence of 1%. It s characterized by three important symptom clusters newlinenamely positive, negative and cognitive symptoms. Except for the positive newlinesymptoms, there are no effective treatments available for the negative and newlinecognitive symptoms. In addition, the existing treatments are not free of side newlineeffects; some causing extrapyramidal side effects and others causing metabolic newlineside effects. newlineUnavailability of effective biological treatments for negative and cognitive newlinesymptoms adds to the already existing burden of socio-occupational newlinedysfunction associated with these symptom clusters. Psychosocial interventions newlineare available targeting a few or most of the domains of social cognition with or newlinewithout neurocognition training. But majority of them [for example, Cognitive newlineEnhancement Therapy(CET), Social Cognition Interaction Training(SCIT)] are newlinehighly resource intensive and its feasibility in developing countries are newlinequestionable, though they might be effective. Moreover, they were developed newlineamong the western patient population and its cultural validity in eastern newlinecountries with more of religious inclination is yet to be tested. Hence, there is newlinea need to explore the role of other complementary therapies like yoga for an newlineintegrated approach in treating patients with schizophrenia. newlineYoga as a mind-body therapy is useful in lifestyle related disorders, including newlineneuropsychiatric disorders. In healthy adults and elderly, yoga is found to be newlineefficacious in improving cognitive skills. Yoga has been shown to significantly newlineimprove negative symptoms and functioning in schizophrenia patients. In a newlinerecent study, along with improvements in functioning, yoga also increased newlineoxytocin levels along with improvement in Facial Emotion Recognition Deficit newline(FERD) in patients with schizophrenia.(Jayaram et al., 2013). In this study, we newlinehypothesized that practice of yoga for one month would improve social newlinecognition in patients with schizophrenia.