Investigating the Effect of Yoga-based Breathing Styles on the Human Brain, With a Focus on Memory

NCT05846425 | Recruiting

• 1 other identifier: MST-Breathing Study
• Study Type: interventional
• Target: 75
• Locations: 1 country
• Sites: 1

Brief Summary

The goal of this clinical trial is to learn if yoga-based breathing styles could improve memory performance in adult persons without relevant prior experience in yoga, meditation or similar disciplines and without existing health problems which could hinder the implementation of the breathing exercises. The main questions it aims to answer are:

• Can the memory performance get better ?
• Can the subjective stress level be reduced ? Participants will complete a memory test while doing a specific nasal and oral breathing. They will complete a two-week training period after the test with daily nasal or mouth breathing training or no training at all, depending on the group, the are divided into. Researchers will compare the effect of different breathing styles on memory ability among themselves.

Conditions

Hypoventilation; Hyperventilation

Keywords

Mnemonic similarity task; Yoga-breathing; Memory enhancement

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (1)

• Improvement of learned images

  Memory improvement by performing the home nasal breathing training. The correctness of the mapping is measured by the percentage correctness of the given answers in the memory test, which takes place promptly after the learning phase and 2 weeks later.

  2 weeks

Secondary Outcomes (1)

• Reduction of subjective stress level

  2 weeks

Study Arms (3)

Nose-breathing

EXPERIMENTAL

Controlled nose-breathing

Other: Nose-breathing training

Mouth-breathing

ACTIVE COMPARATOR

Controlled mouth-breathing

Other: Mouth-breathing training

Control group

NO INTERVENTION

no intervention

Interventions

Nose-breathing training OTHER

13 days of controlled nose-breathing training at a specific frequency with a duration of approximately 15 min a day

Nose-breathing

Mouth-breathing training OTHER

13 days of controlled mouth-breathing training at a specific frequency with a duration of approximately 15 min a day

Mouth-breathing

Eligibility Criteria

• Age: 18 Years+
• Sex: all
• Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Age Groups: Adult (18-64), Older Adult (65+)

You may qualify if:

• Willingness to take on the 2-week exercises but no new athletic or meditative activities
• Yoga-naive and without significant prior experience in various meditative or athletic disciplines that ostensibly involve elements of breath control
• Access to a device with internet access
• Signing of the consent form to participate in the study

You may not qualify if:

• Known clinically relevant internal or neurological diseases, especially if associated with chronic pathological oxygenation (e.g. COPD, severe bronchial asthma, sleep apnea, but also CKD).
• History of drug or alcohol abuse
• Known psychiatric illnesses that currently require therapy (e.g., pronounced claustrophobia)
• Medication that could falsify the data collected
• Lack of consent to take note of possible incidental findings
• known epileptic seizures, which could be intensified by the visual insertion of the stimuli

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Universität des Saarlandes: lead

Study Sites (1)

Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Neuroradiology, Saarland University Medical Center

Homburg, Saarland, 66421, Germany

RECRUITING

Related Publications (3)

• Zelano C, Jiang H, Zhou G, Arora N, Schuele S, Rosenow J, Gottfried JA. Nasal Respiration Entrains Human Limbic Oscillations and Modulates Cognitive Function. J Neurosci. 2016 Dec 7;36(49):12448-12467. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2586-16.2016.

  PMID: 27927961 BACKGROUND

• Klippenstein JL, Stark SM, Stark CEL, Bennett IJ. Neural substrates of mnemonic discrimination: A whole-brain fMRI investigation. Brain Behav. 2020 Mar;10(3):e01560. doi: 10.1002/brb3.1560. Epub 2020 Feb 3.

  PMID: 32017430 BACKGROUND

• Stark SM, Kirwan CB, Stark CEL. Mnemonic Similarity Task: A Tool for Assessing Hippocampal Integrity. Trends Cogn Sci. 2019 Nov;23(11):938-951. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2019.08.003. Epub 2019 Oct 6.

  PMID: 31597601 BACKGROUND

MeSH Terms

Conditions

Hypoventilation; Hyperventilation

Condition Hierarchy (Ancestors)

Respiratory Insufficiency; Respiration Disorders; Respiratory Tract Diseases; Signs and Symptoms, Respiratory; Signs and Symptoms; Pathological Conditions, Signs and Symptoms

Study Officials

• Christoph Krick, Dr.rer.med.

  University of Saarland

  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Central Study Contacts

Maximilian A Becker

CONTACT

+49 176 20205231; maximilian_arno.becker@uni-saarland.de

Study Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Phase: not applicable
• Allocation: RANDOMIZED
• Masking: NONE
• Purpose: BASIC SCIENCE
• Intervention Model: PARALLEL
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: SPONSOR

Model Details: Nose-breathing group, Mouth-breathing group, Control group

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: April 26, 2023
• First Posted: May 6, 2023
• Study Start: June 3, 2023
• Primary Completion: July 1, 2024
• Study Completion: December 1, 2024
• Last Updated: April 17, 2024

Record last verified: 2024-04

Data Sharing

• IPD Sharing: Will not share

Locations

DE (1)