Management of dyspnea (shortness of breath) is a major problem for patients with chronic obstructive lung diseases (COPD). The effectiveness of traditional supervised and home-based exercise programs for decreasing dyspnea is well established. The remaining knowledge gap is the efficacy of complementary exercises that patients report they are using to manage dyspnea, that may be more congruent with pulmonary patients’ lifestyles and values, and that can be adapted to changes in illness severity and disability.

Yoga practice is a complementary therapy that people use to manage their dyspnea. Previous studies lack controlled designs, large samples, protocol descriptions, or valid instruments for measuring dyspnea.

The aims of this exploratory study are:

1. To develop a safe and feasible yoga program for patients with COPD;

2. To test the efficacy of this program, while establishing the decrease in dyspnea that may be expected with such a program;

3. To determine whether secondary outcomes of physical performance, psychological well being, and health related quality of life (HRQL) are positively affected by yoga practice;

4. To identify and contact community resources including physicians, nurses, yoga practitioners and facilities to support the testing of yoga training for patients with COPD in targeted communities. In a prospective randomized controlled trial three cohorts of subjects with moderate to severe COPD (N=36) will be randomly assigned to either an experimental yoga training, conducted at Osher Center, or a usual care control for 12 weeks.

The usual care control group will be offered an identifical yoga training program at Osher Center following 12 weeks of participation in the usual care control group. Outcomes will be measured at baseline, after each session, and immediately after the training program.

If yoga is shown to affect dyspnea in patients with COPD, the findings of this exploratory study will serve as a foundation for the writing of a multi-center controlled trial to compare the effect of yoga training on dyspnea and multivariate outcomes to an attention control group and a usual care group with a larger sample of patients with moderate to severe COPD.