Correlation between serum cortisol levels and practice of yoga and meditation in medical students

Abstract

Introduction and Aim: Recent year’s yoga has gained a very good response in today’s world as one of the natural methods to reduce stress. Yoga acts as an adjuvant to many kinds of treatment for various stress-related disorders. To meet the modern lifestyle full of tension, stress and challenges and to gain all round personality development yoga is mandatory. With this background current study was carried out, to estimate and compare the serum cortisol levels and heart rate variability and also to evaluate the relationship between serum cortisol levels, heart rate variability before and after yoga and meditation practice for six weeks in study group and control group in first year medical students.   Material and Methods: Informed consent was obtained before the start of the study. The current study was a quasi-experimental study with 80 subjects, 40 medical students as cases which is an interventional group and 40 students as a control group. For a period of six weeks, yoga and meditation practice was given to an interventional group by a yoga master daily for one hour.   Results: After practicing yoga regularly and promptly, cases showed decrease in serum cortisol levels and improvement in HRV parameters, frequency domain values like RMSSD increased and among time domain values HF increased and LF, LF/HF ratio decreased. There was no change observed in serum cortisol levels and HRV parameters of the control group. We observed statistically significant negative correlation between serum cortisol levels and HRV parameters in the interventional group after yoga practice.     Conclusion: Hence, incorporation of yoga and meditation as part of our lifestyle in medical students will help them to cope up with day-to-day stress during their study period.