What are the benefits and harms of yoga for adults with chronic non-specific low back pain?

Abstract

Although yoga may benefit adults with chronic non‐specific low back pain, most of the evidence is of low to very low certainty, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions.For adults with chronic non‐specific low back pain and compared with a non‐exercise control, yoga may moderately improve back‐specific function at four weeks to 12 months (low‐ to moderate‐certainty evidence) and may slightly improve pain up to six months, although without reaching the minimum clinically important difference of 15 points on the 0 to 100 scale (very low‐ to moderate‐certainty evidence). Low‐certainty evidence suggests that more people reported clinical improvement with yoga than with control (from 347 to 184 more people) from four weeks to six months. Very low‐ to low‐certainty evidence suggests that quality of life and depression might improve with yoga, although RCTs lacked adequate numbers of participants and estimations were imprecise. Moderate‐certainty evidence shows that more people experienced an adverse event with yoga than with control, although these events were infrequent and were generally minor (on average, 43 vs 9 per 1000 people experienced an adverse event).