effect of, yoga based lifestyle intervention on sleeping problem in perimenopausal women

effect of, yoga based lifestyle intervention on sleeping problem in perimenopausal women     sepehrian f [1] *     received: 3oct, 2011 accepted: 4 dec, 2011     abstract   background & aims: perimenopause is the stage of a woman's life that begins several years before menopause , when the ovaries gradually begin to produce less estrogen. a number of factors gang up in perimenopause to disturb women's sleep. most therapies for sleep problem use a mixture of different psycho physiological therapies including pharmacotherapy, cognitive therapy, and behavioral therapy. and some of them say that complementary methods as yoga are useful. the purpose of the present study was to examine whether yoga intervention has any effect on perimenopausal women's problem sleep.   materials & methods: to achieve our aim, first the pittsburgh sleep quality index was administered to women of 40-50 years old in the exercise classes. the base of the result questionnaires and interviews selected 20 subjects that had sleeping problem. then 20 women who had poor sleep, but no sports experience were selected as control group. experimental group participated in yoga for 10 weeks, 3 sessions of 1.5 hour. finally pittsburgh sleep quality index was administrated to both groups again. analysis of the data involved both descriptive and inferential statistics including means, standard deviations, t-test and co-variance analyses.   result: analysis of the data submitted to t-test, and analysis of co-variance indicated significant differences between the pretest and posttest results. in other words, there was significant differences among the experimental vs., control group as for as the level of impairment in daily functioning was decreased. further analysis through the co-variance test showed that the level of sleep disorder significantly decreased in yoga group. further more, there was no significant difference among groups, as far as the level of delay in falling asleep.   conclusion: the result of this study shows that yoga based lifestyle intervention has positive effects on perimenopausal women's sleep problem.   keywords: sleep problem, perimenopause, yoga     address: urmia, physical education, university of urmia, tel: (+98) 9141451889   email: [email protected]   [1] assistant professor , faculty of physical education , urmia university , urmia, iran (corresponding author)