Yoga Clinical Trials for Major Neurological Disorders Including Headache: Trends and Advances

The global prevalence of neurological disorders is high, causing significant disability and death. Healthcare costs associated with these disorders place a financial burden on patients and the healthcare sector. As a result, patients often turn to mind-body practices such as Yoga to manage symptoms and improve their quality of life. Yoga is considered safe, easily accessible, and cost-effective, and has been shown to offer physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual benefits. The benefits of Yoga for neurological disorders are wide-ranging, including improvements in the physical, emotional, and psychosocial well-being of an individual. In this chapter, comprehensive literature search was performed in the PubMed and Google Scholar databases to review the literature available for clinical application of Yoga therapy in neurological disorders. This review has been restricted to randomized controlled trials published in English which used Yoga as an intervention for neurological disorders. The search yielded 79 results, of which 54 studies have been included in this review. Based on the current literature, Yoga-based interventions have the potential to be an effective and holistic add-on therapy for various common neurological disorders such as headache, multiple sclerosis, stroke, mild cognitive impairment, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, neuromuscular disorders, neuropathies, and traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries.