Speech Evoked Frequency Following Response in Regular Yoga Practitioners

Abstract

Yoga is an ancient physical and mental discipline that has its roots in India and dates back more than 2,000 years. Yoga is a mind, body and soul practice that incorporates asanas, or certain physical positions, pranayama, breathing exercises, meditation, and relaxation to promote the unity of the mind and body. Yoga has found to improve overall health of body and auditory system as well. From the studies Yoga’s benefit can be seen by variety of audiological tests. The present study aimed to explore the influence of yoga practice on subcortical auditory processing using Speech evoked Frequency Following Response (FFR). Twenty-four adults aged between 40 and 60 years were recruited and divided into two groups: yoga practitioners (n = 13) and non-yoga individuals (n = 11). All participants had normal hearing sensitivity and no history of neurological or auditory pathology. FFR was recorded by using a 170ms synthesized /da/ stimulus, and measures such as amplitude of fundamental frequency (F0), first formant (F1), and second formant (F2) were analyzed. Results revealed no statistically significant differences between the groups across the measured parameters. However, the yoga group exhibited slightly better median amplitudes in F0 and also morphology was slightly better in yoga group. The absence of significance may be attributed to individual age mismatches within the groups, as the majority of yoga participants were above 50 years, while most non-yoga participants were younger. Despite this, the yoga group showed comparable neural responses as younger non yoga group, suggesting a potential neurophysiological benefit of yoga in maintaining auditory temporal encoding. These findings align with previous literature indicating that yoga supports neural efficiency and cognitive health. Future research with larger, age-matched samples and additional FFR parameters is recommended to further understand the relationship between yoga and auditory brainstem processing.