Critical Appraisal of the Impact of Yoga on Depression and Anxiety in Women

Running head: CRITICAL APPRAISAL
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note

CRITICAL APPRAISAL
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Question 1:
The study aims to evaluate the impact of yoga on female experiencing anxiety and
depression. Javnbakht, Kenari and Ghasemi (2009), focused on the effect of yoga on the
depression and anxiety of women since Yoga has been considered as an effective stress
management tool which can assist in the reduction of depression as well as anxiety disorders.
Question2:
The author used the case-control study to study the impact of yoga on the depression and
anxiety where twice a week, for 90 minutes 34 participants receive yoga and the control group
received an intervention (Javnbakht, Kenari & Ghasemi, 2009). Ioannidis et al. (2015), suggested
that case-control study is the most suitable study design for evaluating the relationship between
the exposed group and outcome.
Question 3:
The researchers randomly divided into an experimental and a control group, indicating
no selection bias are present in the study. The study only included the patients with the anxiety
and depression and excluded the patients with a history of psychiatric disorders and experience
of yoga (Javnbakht, Kenari & Ghasemi, 2009). The time frame of the study includes July 2006 to
July 2007. The sample size was not adequate since more participants can be recruited by
considering the duration of the study (Lewis, 2015).

CRITICAL APPRAISAL
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Question 4:
The control participants are also randomly selected to evaluate the impact of the
intervention by comparing exposed and unexposed group (Javnbakht, Kenari & Ghasemi, 2009).
The sample included new patient referrals who willing to take part in yoga without any history
of mental illness. Experimental as well as control groups were matched for demographic details
and both groups were exhibited similar scores in the depression as well as anxiety (Baumberg,
2016).
Question 5:
For minimizing the potential bias, all new cases were evaluated using a personal
information questionnaire, Spielberger (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory) test and Beck depression
inventory objective measurement. The exposure was clearly defined and the measurement
method was similar for case and control.
Question 6 (a):
Apart from the experimental group, the other group such as control group was treated
equally since all the new cases were assessed with proper intervention tools followed by
categorized into the experimental group and control group. Hence, no bias was observed in this
case.
Question 6(b):
The researchers considered confounding factors such as the history of psychiatric
disorders, experience of yoga but excluded while diving the experimental group and control
group. However, the researchers did not mention the economic factors which can influence the