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Review
. 2023 Jan 14;20(2):1556.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph20021556.

Prenatal Yoga-Based Interventions May Improve Mental Health during Pregnancy: An Overview of Systematic Reviews with Meta-Analysis

Olga Villar-Alises  1   2 , Patricia Martinez-Miranda  1   2 , Javier Martinez-Calderon  1   2
Affiliations
Review

Prenatal Yoga-Based Interventions May Improve Mental Health during Pregnancy: An Overview of Systematic Reviews with Meta-Analysis

Olga Villar-Alises et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

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.

Keywords: anxiety; depression; meta-analysis; pregnancy; prenatal care; systematic review; yoga.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Prisma flow diagram.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Network visualization analysis.
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This research received no external funding.