Yoga appears to be effective in reducing migraine intensity and frequency

Reference

Long C, Ye J, Chen M, Gao D, Huang Q. Effectiveness of yoga therapy for migraine treatment: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled studies. Am J Emerg Med 2022;58:95-99.

Synopsis

These authors searched several databases and one registry to identify randomized trials that compared yoga with standard therapies in participants with migraine headaches. They included 6 studies with 445 participants. Five of the 6 studies took place in Asia. All the studies had Jadad scores of 3 or more, indicating low risk of bias. Overall, the standard mean difference in pain intensity for yoga compared with standard therapies was -1.21 (95% CI -2.17 to -0.25), a borderline meaningful difference. Additionally, yoga decreased headache frequency and duration. However, since the authors don’t report the duration of the studies or provide a time-based denominator, the precise numbers don’t really mean much. The authors found significant heterogeneity in the data and suspect that a single study was responsible for much of it. Although the authors set up their study in a reasonable manner, their reporting leaves much to be desired. They fail to report the following: whether the studies were for acute treatment or prevention; the duration of the studies; the baseline therapies used by participants; whether yoga replaced baseline therapy or was added; whether they searched for unpublished studies. The authors, reasonably, did not test for publication bias because of the small number of included studies. I suspect publication bias is a significant issue in this case.