Prenatal yoga-based interventions may improve mental health during pregnancy: an overview of systematic reviews with meta-analysis

An overview of systematic reviews with meta-analysis was developed to summarize evidence on the effectiveness of prenatal yoga-based interventions on pain, psychological symptoms, and quality of life during pregnancy. CINAHL (via EBSCOhost), Embase, PubMed, SPORTDiscus (via EBSCOhost), and the Cochr...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Villar-Alises, Olga, Martínez-Miranda, Patricia, Martínez Calderón, Javier
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2023
Country:España
Institution:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repository:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/144646
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/144646
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20021556
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Anxiety
Depression
Meta-analysis
Pregnancy
Prenatal care
Systematic review
Yoga
Description
Summary:An overview of systematic reviews with meta-analysis was developed to summarize evidence on the effectiveness of prenatal yoga-based interventions on pain, psychological symptoms, and quality of life during pregnancy. CINAHL (via EBSCOhost), Embase, PubMed, SPORTDiscus (via EBSCOhost), and the Cochrane Library were searched from inception to 15 December 2022. The intervention of interest was any prenatal yoga-based intervention. Pain, psychological symptoms, and quality of life were considered as outcome measures. The methodological quality of systematic reviews was judged using AMSTAR 2. The primary study overlap among systematic reviews was evaluated, building a citation matrix and calculating the corrected covered area (CCA). A total of ten systematic reviews, including fifteen meta-analyses of interest and comprising 32 distinct primary clinical trials, were included. Meta-analyses on pain and quality of life were not found. Most meta-analyses (93%) showed that prenatal yoga-based interventions are more effective than control interventions in reducing anxiety, depression, and stress symptoms. However, the overall methodological quality of systematic reviews was judged as critically low, and primary study overlap among systematic reviews was very high (CCA = 16%). Altogether, prenatal yoga-based interventions could improve the mental health of pregnant women, although due to the important methodological flaws that were detected, future systematic reviews should improve their methodological quality before drawing firm conclusions on this topic.