An Overview Of An Integrated Approach To Yoga Therapy And Autism Spectrum Disorders

Summary In this study conducted by Radhakrishna et al., (2010), six children from the ages of 8-14 with Autism Spectrum Disorder were monitored five times a week by a yoga-instructor over the course of two years to see changes or improvements in their eye-to-eye gaze, sitting tolerance, body posture, body awareness, depth perception, imitation skills, self-stimulatory behaviors, spatial relationship awareness, and self -injurious behavior. A check-in was also conducted at the 1-year mark. It was hypothesized that repeatedly following the yoga therapist's movements would stimulate mirror neuron activation, thus resulting in improved self-awareness.

Reasoning A treatment that is beneficial to all of those who have ASD has yet to be found, thus the idea of yoga-therapy use being born. Yoga was considered because through the practice of various breathing techniques, postures, relaxation and meditation yoga is known to improve mental conditions. Anxious children with ASD tend to have difficulty learning due to high levels of stress, impacting the growth of neurons in the hippocampus which is associated with memory. The specific movements and poses are beneficial to create a better sense of self and to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, calming down the child. It is also thought that the central nervous system abnormally processes information in children with ASD, causing stress and over-arousal. The repetitive nature of yoga-therapy could benefit the central nervous system by calming down the children or helping them in becoming more awake.

Results The results shown at the end of the study were significantly promising. All target goals had been improved due to many factors within the yoga class (see figure 1), one of them being the individual mats. Using an individual mat was thought to aid in increasing the feeling of safety, which was proven correct by the fact that major changes were seen in the way the children handled personal space, which led to an improvement in memory, imitation skills, verbal receptive skills, and expression. Not only were the factors originally experimented for impact, but an observation that family relationships, home behaviors, breath regulation, tolerance of sitting, adult interactions, and basic substantial socialization all showed major improvements as well.

(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3151379/)