Effect of yoga on serum adrenaline, serum cortisol levels, plasma melatonin and cardiovascular parameters in hyper-reactors to cold pressor test in young healthy volunteers

Background: Now days, stress is dangerous & significant problems of World & affect physical, mental, behavioral, and emotional health. Yoga has been reported to control stress, to be beneficial in treating stress related disorders, improving autonomic functions, lower blood pressure, increase strength and flexibility of muscles, improve the sense of wellbeing, slowed ageing process, control breathing, reducing signs of oxidative stress and improving spiritual growth. (Chanda Rajak et al., 2012) Objective: The aim of present study was to investigate whether regular practice of Yoga for six months can reduce the level of adrenaline, serum cortisol, plasma melatonin and cardiovascular reactivity induced by cold pressor test. Material and Method: The study group comprises 50 healthy subjects of 18-25 years age group. Initially there were 30 hyper-reactors to cold pressor test. The hyper-reactivity of 25 volunteers converted to hypo-reactivity after the yoga therapy of six months (83.3%). The parameters like level of serumadrenaline, serum cortisol, plasma melatonin, basal blood pressure, rise in blood pressure and pulse rate were also significantly reduced statistically by using student‘t’ test. Result: Regular practice of yoga significantly reduce the level of Adrenaline, serum cortisol, plasma melatonin and cardiovascular hyper-reactivity to cold pressor test, in basal blood pressure, rise in blood pressure and pulse rate after six month of yoga practice. Conclusion: We concluded that regular practice of yoga for six months reduced the possibly by inducing parasympathetic predominance and cortico-hypothalamo-medullary inhibition, who was hyper–reactive to cold stress, This shows that yoga provides significant improvement in aging to reduce the morbidity and mortality from stress induced disorders. Yogic practices can be used as psychophysiologic stimuli to increase endogenous secretion of melatonin, which, in turn, might be responsible for improved sense of well-being.