Effectiveness of Yoga on attention of Medical students: A prospective study.

Attention plays a huge role in various cognitive processes like comprehension and reasoning. Reduced  attention span, lack of focused attention and  easy distractibility are all  adverse factors for the learning process in a medical student which is perceived more so  in the millennial students. Attention span is the amount of concentrated time a person can spend on a task without becoming distracted. Integrated yoga addresses the need for increasing the attention span and improving the students’ ability to concentrate more.This study aims to assess the effectiveness of yoga on attention span and sustained attention in medical students and to compare and analyze this effect on attention with that of controls. A yoga module was curated for this study by Professor of yoga. This cross sectional study  comprised of 60 participants – Yoga group:thirty voluntary preclinical medical students in the age group of 18-22 years, willing to perform yoga. Non-Yoga Group: Thirty volunteer students who do not perform yoga but willing to participate in the study. All participants underwent the following pre –yoga attention  tests. These include colour trail tests1 and 2, digit vigilance test, conducted by clinical psychologist along with  the   subject MCQ test. Following this, yoga training was done by certified expert for one hour per day for a total of 30 hours. Same  attention tests were repeated following yoga for all sixty participants. The results obtained were compared and analyzed using students t tests and repeated measure ANOVA. No invasive investigations were required for this study. The yoga module was  effective in  increasing the  attention span. There was a significant reduction in the completion timing of attention tests. It was also observed that the number of errors in digit vigilance test were reduced following intervention in the yoga group. Thus our study concludes that the yoga module was effective in improving sustained and divided attention in the yoga participants following yoga training.