Researchers have asserted that practicing yoga could end up helping women cut back on inflammatory responses-inducing certain compounds in their blood to keep heart diseases, strokes and type-2 diabetes, among others, at bay.

Researchers from the Ohio State University have discovered that indulging in yoga helps reduce the amount of the cytokine interleukin-6 compound in a person's blood.

IL-6 is a key element of the body's inflammatory response and has been held responsible for various age-related problems. Researchers have now stressed that using yoga to cut back the inflammation might provide very significant short and long term health benefits.

"In addition to having lower levels of inflammation before they were stressed, we also saw lower inflammatory responses to stress among the expert yoga practitioners in the study. Hopefully, this means that people can eventually learn to respond less strongly to stressors in their everyday lives by using yoga and other stress-reducing modalities", said Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, lead author of the study.

For the sake of study, 50 women were analyzed, all with the average age of 41, who were all assigned to different tasks, and conclusions were then drawn.