Just one yoga class a week reduces anxiety in pregnant women

Women who are worried about childbirth might want to consider turning to yoga, as just one class a week for eight weeks can help reduce anxiety levels.

According to chroniclelive.co.uk, researchers from Newcastle and Manchester University says that yoga can help decrease anxiety and stress levels more than just standard antenatal treatment. They studied 59 women who were about to become mothers for the first time. Half of them took one yoga class a week, whilst the others only underwent normal antenatal treatment.

Just one session can decrease anxiety by a third and stress by 14 per cent. Similar declines were reported at the final yoga session too, meaning it continues to be effective over time.

A number of experts are now calling on the NHS to offer yoga classes for free to pregnant women and professor John Aplin, who is a specialist in reproductive biomedicine, is one of them.

"It would be relatively cheap to implement, could help mothers and their children be healthier, as well as reducing the costs of longer-term healthcare," he explains.

He suggests that yoga could even help women handle the pain of childbirth better. Furthermore, it's possible that such exercises could also help decrease the number of emergency C-sections, reports dailymail.co.uk.