People with chronic insomnia could benefit from tai chi as an alternative to talking therapies, a study has suggested.<\/p>\n
Researchers writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) said their study \u201csupports the use of tai chi as an alternative approach for the long-term management of chronic insomnia in middle-aged and older adults\u201d.<\/p>\n
Guidelines for doctors to treat people with insomnia often include managing issues such as anxiety, as well as short-term courses of sleeping pills and cognitive behavioural talking therapy (CBT) for more severe cases.<\/p>\n
In the new study, 200 people aged 50 and older with chronic insomnia were split into two groups to either undertake tai chi or have CBT.<\/p>\n
All of the people in the study were free of other chronic conditions that may affect sleep, were not taking part in regular aerobic or mind-body exercise, had not received previous CBT treatment and were not working shifts.<\/p>\n
They either did tai chi or CBT for one-hour sessions twice a week, for a total of 24 sessions.<\/p>\n
People scored their symptoms such as difficulty falling and staying asleep, waking up too early and being unable to go back to sleep, and impact on daily life.<\/p>\n
After the three-month period was up, the CBT group had better scores on improvements to their insomnia than those undertaking tai chi.<\/p>\n
However, in the longer-term, 15 months after the start of the study, tai chi seemed to match CBT and even slightly outperformed it.<\/p>\n
Tai chi and CBT were found to also have comparable benefits in areas such as quality of life, mental health and physical activity level.<\/p>\n
The authors, from the University of Hong Kong, acknowledged some people in the study may have continued tai chi after the three-month period, which may have skewed the results.<\/p>\n
But they said: \u201cOur findings suggest that tai chi can lead to substantial improvements in insomnia severity after a three-month intervention while the long-term efficacy of tai chi is non-inferior to that of CBT, the gold standard treatment for chronic insomnia.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People with chronic insomnia could benefit from tai chi as an alternative to talking therapies, a study has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155634,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[103143,72874,134,38175,111,139,69,28266],"class_list":{"0":"post-155633","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-british-medical-journal","9":"tag-chronic-conditions","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-insomnia","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-tai-chi"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}