Impact of Qigong exercises on the severity of the menopausal symptoms and health-related quality of life: A randomised controlled trial

ABSTRACT

The aim of the present study was to analyze the effects of a Qigong exercise programme on the severity of the menopausal symptoms and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of community-dwelling postmenopausal women. This was done by means of a randomised clinical trial with a sample of 125 women who were assigned to either a control (n = 62) or an experimental group (n = 63). The severity of their menopause-related symptoms and HRQoL were assessed through the Menopause Rating Scale (MRS) and the 36-item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36) respectively, before and after the intervention period. The main findings of our study reveal significant improvement in the severity of menopausal symptoms at the somatic, psychological, and urogenital levels, as well as in the total score of the MRS. Additionally, participants assigned to the Qigong group experienced improvement in the general health, physical functioning, role-physical, bodily pain, vitality, and mental health domains of the 36-item Short-Form Health Survey, as well as in its physical component and mental component summaries. We can therefore conclude that, among Spanish postmenopausal women, a twelve-week Qigong exercise programme has beneficial effects on the severity of menopausal symptoms and HRQoL.

Highlights

• We have studied the effects of Qigong on menopause-related quality of life.

• Qigong is a useful tool in the management of the severity of menopausal symptoms.

• A 12-week Qigong programme showed benefits on health-related quality of life.

Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03989453.

KEYWORDS:

• Qigong
• postmenopausal women
• older women
• quality of life
• menopausal symptoms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that has been used is confidential. Due to the sensitive nature of the questions asked in this study, survey respondents were assured raw data would remain confidential and would not be shared.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by the project 1260735 from the 2014–2020 Operational Programme FEDER in Andalusia and by the project UP Again Senior (PNDPT – IPDJ – CP/532/DDT/2020) from the Instituto Português do Desporto e Juventude.