“Doctor’s Orders” is a new feature in the collaboration between Medpage Today and ABC News. We’ll be exploring medical issues of interest to physicians and their patients. In this first monthly segment, we look at the increasing body of research into the effects of yoga yoga in a variety of conditions as interest in this form of therapy grows.

At major cancer centers across the country, patients are putting themselves in a better ‘position’ to cope with their cancer.

Some of the biggest names in cancer care — M.D. Anderson, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and Dana Farber among them — now offer their patients classes in yoga.

In the past, physicians may have written off the therapy as merely a trendy yuppie pasttime. But today, researchers — mainly psychologists — are asking questions about the benefits of yoga in a variety of conditions, including cancer, asthma, sleep disorders, depression, and attention disorders.

Generally, the studies have shown that yoga improves quality of life and relieves stress and anxiety associated with these conditions. Some researchers say the Ayurvedic therapy may have physiological mechanisms, like reducing cortisol levels, but those theories are still under evaluation.

A word of caution, though: The studies that have been done so far have yielded soft findings, with little hard data to back up the conclusions. That said, there is no denying that yoga is becoming a presence even in the ivory towers of academic medicine.

Yoga for Cancer Patients

Alyson Moadel, PhD, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, N.Y., has been tracking the effects of yoga on breast cancer patients at Montefiore Medical Center for the past eight years.

In 2007, Moadel reported early findings from the study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology: Patients who did yoga saw improvements in social and emotional well-being, compared with those who didn’t.

When data on patients undergoing chemotherapy were excluded, yoga also significantly improved overall quality of life.

“I think it’s going to be an important complementary modality,” Moadel said. “I don’t think it’s the only one, but I think it is an important one for dealing with stress and anxiety.”

Yoga classes are offered three times a week at Montefiore. Patients gather in a conference room for the seated yoga sessions, which include stretching in a mix of seated and standing poses for the first hour of the class. Then the instructor dims the lights for meditation, breathing and relaxation.

For pregnant women, an influenza vaccination leads to bigger babies and infants who are less likely to get the flu, according to three studies presented here.

Experts said the findings — presented at the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America — might help persuade pregnant women reluctant to get a flu shot.

It might also bring the issue to the attention of obstetricians, who typically do not raise the notion of a flu shot with their patients, said Dr. William Schaffner, infectious disease specialist and chair of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.

“This is powerful information for obstetricians and pregnant women to have,” said Schaffner, who moderated a news conference at which the studies were discussed.

The findings are all the more persuasive, he said, because different investigators, using varied methods, “all came out with the same answer.”

The issue is important, according to Dr. Marietta Vazquez, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Yale University School of Medicine, because the proportion of pregnant women who are vaccinated against the flu is “dismal” — fewer than one in four, she and others said.

Vazquez and colleagues conducted a study of infants admitted to their hospital, starting in 2000. Infants with confirmed flu were the cases, and for comparison they each were matched with two babies who were admitted for other reasons.

Proof in the Numbers

The goal of the study is to compare the mothers — using both questionnaires and medical records — to see if they were vaccinated during their pregnancies, Vazquez said.

For the 119 women with complete medical records and an infant with the flu, only 5 percent had been vaccinated, the researchers found. By contrast, of the 172 mothers of control infants, 16 percent had been vaccinated.

The numbers suggested that flu vaccine given to mothers during pregnancy is effective in preventing hospitalization of their infants, Vazquez said.

Specifically, for all nonvaccinated infants, the effectiveness was 80.4 percent.

Vazquez said the results might help persuade more women to get vaccinated. “If they’re not getting vaccinated for themselves,” she said, “maybe they’ll do it for their babies.”