Medical Yoga for Patients With Stress-related Symptoms and Diagnoses

Main outcome:

The Perceived Stress Scale is a 10-item self report questionnaire that measures persons' evaluation of the stressfulness of the situations in the past month of their lives. The citation for the 10-item scale is Cohen, S., & Williamson, G. (1988). Perceived stress in a probability sample of the United States. In S. Spacapan & S. Oskamp (Eds.). The Perceived Stress Scale is the only empirically established index of general stress appraisal. "The PSS measures the degree to which situations in one's life are appraised as stressful" (Cohen, et al., 1983; p. 385).

PSS-10 scores are obtained by reversing the scores on the four positive items, e.g., 0=4, 1=3, 2=2, etc. and then summing across all 10 items. Items 4,5, 7, and 8 are the positively stated items. Scores can range from 0 to 40, with higher scores indicating greater stress.

The PSS is not a diagnostic instrument, so there are no cut-offs. There are only comparisons between people in a given sample. There are some normative data on the PSS based on a 1983 Harris Poll of a representative U.S. sample. These data may be helpful in providing comparisons, but they are over 20 years old. See: Cohen, S., & Williamson, G. (1988).

Inclusion criteria

• The patients had sought treatment at the primary health centre during the previous 6 months.
• The stress-related symptoms included fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, depression, hypertension, and musculoskeletal discomfort in the neck and shoulders.

Exclusion criteria

• Inability to understand instructions, interpretation needs or physical or mental inability to carry out the Medical yoga exercises, such as mental retardation or dementia, and severe physical or mental illness.