Does Laughter Yoga provide benefit for
participants with dementia?
A pilot study to test a method of
quantifying benefit.
Why bother:
·
To this point, very little hard
evidence for benefits of laughter yoga, mostly anecdotal
·
Those who run the program in
MounForest have noted participants have increased engagement with staff and
with each other through progression of the program, humour, remember staff,
participants are happier and brighter and seem to be more playful
·
Laughter yoga is a program that
is fairly easy to implement and low cost, if it is also beneficial to
participants, we should increase the number of programs in rural Ontario.
·
The Day Out program offered by
VON also provides welcome respite to caregivers. The majority of participants
in the Mount Forest program live with family caregivers.
·
The percentage of elderly in
rural Ontario is increasing, our FHT is looking for programs to serve them
Lit Review will include:
·
Has been shown to be useful for
elderly depressed women when compared to another exercise program
·
Yoga decreases symptoms of
anxiety depression, pain (poor evidence)
·
Yoga improves physical health
but not mental health in patients with chronic disease
·
In patients waiting for organ
transplant, laughter yoga shows immediate improvement in mood and heart rate variability
·
Some evidence for positive
emotions having a positive effect on enhancement of well being
·
Humour therapy may be helpful
for the treatment of patients with depression in late life
Lit Review highlights need for:
·
“a more convincing study would
include mood measures before and after intervention”
·
Long term sustained research
·
Study of laughter yoga itself
rather than humour or yoga separately
Purpose and Significance of this Study:
·
To prepare a testable and
repeatable mixed methods review of Laughter Yoga to determine if the program
provides benefit to the participants and their families with an eye on future
Day Out programming at the VON.
·
To describe changes in
wellbeing in participants of Laughter Yoga using validated measures pre and
post intervention (MOCA, RAND vulnerable elders http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/health/projects/acove/docs/acove_ves13.pdf
, functional testing performed at day out program by VON, GDS).
·
To describe impression of
Laughter Yoga by the participants’ caregivers using open ended qualitative
questions pre, during and post involvement in the LY program. To determine if
those studying Laughter Yoga in demented participants are looking in the right
places and inform future studies in this group.
Initial methodology proposed:
·
Prospective study on Laughter
Yoga intervention in the Mount Forest Day Out program for those with dementia
in the area.
·
Pre/post test study design of
quantitative measures
o MOCA, VES, Geriatric Depression score
o VON functional testing
·
Qualitative parallel study of
participants’ caregivers
o Open ended questions about participants’ behaviours at home
o Prompting questions about agitation, socialization, engagement in
family activities
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