Yoga, stretching help lower back pain: study

NEW YORK: People who suffer chronic lower back pain saw about the same improvement after taking yoga classes taught by highly trained teachers as they did from stretching classes, said a study.

The findings, described by authors as the largest US randomized trial on yoga to date, appeared in Archives on Internal Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association.

"We found yoga classes more effective than a self-care book -- but no more effective than stretching classes," said lead study author Karen Sherman, a senior investigator at Group Health Research Institute in Seattle.

"We expected back pain to ease more with yoga than with stretching, so our findings surprised us," she said.

The same group of researchers conducted a smaller trial in 2005 based on a randomized sample of 101 adults. That study suggested yoga was the best remedy for back pain because those who practiced it used fewer pain relievers and had better back function.