Advances in Preventive Medicine
Volume 2015 (2015), Article ID 587489, 1 page
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/587489

Letter to the Editor

Comment on “Effects of Yoga on Utero-Fetal-Placental Circulation in High-Risk Pregnancy: A Randomized Controlled Trial”

Siddharudha Shivalli

Department of Community Medicine, Yenepoya Medical College, Yenepoya University, Mangalore, Karnataka 575018, India

Received 20 August 2015; Accepted 13 September 2015

Academic Editor: John Iskander

Copyright © 2015 Siddharudha Shivalli. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

I read the paper titled “Effects of Yoga on Utero-Fetal-Placental Circulation in High-Risk Pregnancy: A Randomized Controlled Trial” by A. Rakhshani et al. [1] with a great interest. Authors’ efforts are highly commendable. The strength of this study, apart from those mentioned by the authors, is the objectiveness of the key outcomes for yoga intervention. However, the following issues and concerns need to be addressed.

Authors mention that the “sample profile matched closely that of the Bengaluru metropolitan population” which is considered as one of the strengths of the study. I feel that it has to be justified with proper reference/s as the analyzed sample size was too small (, Table ). In fact, the issue of smaller sample size has been mentioned in the limitation.

Authors have used outcome measures such as fetal biparietal diameter, head circumference, abdominal circumference, femur length, and estimated fetal weight (Table ). However, maternal hemoglobin, anemia status, physical activity, dietary, and iron-folate/other supplement intake have an effect on all these fetal parameters [2]. These are the potential confounders in this study and they must have been addressed.

Nonetheless, this study highlights the need of higher level of evidence to assess the effect of yoga on maternal and fetal outcomes.

Conflict of Interests

The author declares that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.

References

A. Rakhshani, R. Nagarathna, R. Mhaskar, A. Mhaskar, A. Thomas, and S. Gunasheela, “Effects of yoga on utero-fetal-placental circulation in high-risk pregnancy: a randomized controlled trial,” Advances in Preventive Medicine, vol. 2015, Article ID 373041, 10 pages, 2015.

S. Muthayya, “Maternal nutrition & low birth weight—what is really important?” Indian Journal of Medical Research, vol. 130, no. 5, pp. 600–608, 2009.