Summer 2024 Vol 38.3A Study to Understand Challenges and Factors that Influence Effective Yoga Interventions for Presbyopia using CLARIFY Guidelines
Authors: Annapoorna K BAMS, PhD (Yoga), Yogish Subraya Kamath MBBS, MS (Ophthalmology), Kalyana C Pentapati BDS, MDS, Gajjela Govardhan Reddy MSc, Lavya Shetty BAMS
Abstract:
The demand for treating diseases using yoga therapy, a Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) treatment, has increased globally. An increase in the research in this yoga area from fewer than 10 research publications per year in the 1990s to at least 20 per year after 2010 is evidence of this change in treatment needs over time. The beneficial effect of yoga therapy has been limited to practice in acute care despite its remarkable success in this domain. This is due to many factors that impact the therapy’s effectiveness, irrespective of disease indications. However, the prime challenges for its effectiveness lie with the reliability of the yoga trial outcome and reporting. There is a great need to reevaluate the yoga trials’ reporting for the reliability of their outcome. This study attempts to address the issue by studying challenges for presbyopia with yoga interventions. Among many indications, progressive vision loss (presbyopia), which occurs due to refractive errors in the ocular region, has scope to be treated effectively with yoga therapies. However, trials for yoga interventions for treating refractive errors have not been studied well. This study was conducted to understand the challenges in yoga therapy trials and its potential to treat presbyopia. The CLARIFY guidelines were used to understand the challenges and factors that impact effective treatment in the current research landscape. We found that trials conducted are not in compliance with the reporting guidelines. Adaptation of CLARIFY guidelines is essential to produce reliable evidence to prescribe yoga therapies to treat refractive errors.
