Yoga-based cardiac rehabilitation improves quality of life for people with heart failure, and the yoga heart failure trial behind the finding is the largest cardiac rehabilitation trial in the world. The Yoga-CaRe HF study followed nearly 3,500 adults with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction across 16 medical centres in India, and its results were presented as late-breaking science at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in Chicago on 7 November 2026. The programme combines yoga with medication, nutrition and lifestyle changes.
The yoga heart failure trial was funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research and coordinated by the Centre for Chronic Disease Control, under the leadership of Prof Dorairaj Prabhakaran, the centre’s executive director and president-elect of the World Heart Federation. Between April 2023 and December 2025, the trial recruited 3,492 adults with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, a condition in which the heart’s main pumping chamber pushes out 40% or less of the blood it contains with each beat. The median age was 57 years, and 27% of participants were women. Half were assigned to the yoga programme, with 1,737 in the intervention group, and 1,755 received enhanced standard care.
The yoga programme itself was supervised and structured. Participants received written health education on living well with heart failure, guided behaviour change and goal-setting help, plus 20 supervised sessions over three months that mixed in-person, virtual and at-home instruction from a board-certified yoga naturopathy physician. The programme was developed to provide an affordable and accessible alternative to a traditional cardiac rehabilitation programme in communities with limited resources, and for patients who may prefer a low-impact physical activity option.
Yoga heart failure trial results at three months
The yoga heart failure trial results at three months showed clear gains. Participants in the yoga group had an 8.1-point greater improvement in their Minnesota Living with Heart Failure Questionnaire scores than the control group, with lower scores indicating better quality of life. They also walked 25.5 metres further in the six-minute walk test, and their quality-adjusted utility values on the EQ-5D-5L questionnaire were 0.05 higher than the control group. All three differences were statistically significant. The researchers said the supervised intervention seemed to be durable, suggesting patients learned things that may help them in the long term.
The yoga heart failure trial did not meet its other main goal. There was no statistically significant difference between the groups in the combined rate of death, hospitalisation or stroke: 364 participants, or 21.0%, in the yoga group died, were hospitalised or had a stroke during a median follow-up of 15 months, compared with 401, or 22.8%, in the enhanced standard care group. That translated to a hazard ratio of 0.90, which was not statistically significant, and the finding was consistent across all prespecified subgroups. Ambalam Chandrasekaran of the Centre for Chronic Disease Control presented the results in Chicago.
Yoga heart failure trial and the India context
The yoga heart failure trial matters because of the scale of the problem in India. Between 8 and 10 million people in India are living with heart failure, many of them typically 10 years younger on average, most younger than 65, than adults with heart failure in high-income countries. Roughly 1.8 million new heart failure cases are diagnosed each year in India, and very few patients receive cardiac rehabilitation. Yoga is culturally acceptable in India, and it can provide many of the benefits of cardiac rehabilitation at a lower cost, which is why the researchers built the programme around it.
A prior trial of nearly 4,000 patients had already shown that the Yoga-CaRe programme, delivered by a trained medical professional, was as safe as a conventional cardiac rehabilitation programme in patients who had a previous heart attack. The new yoga heart failure trial extends that work to heart failure, and it shows the programme improves daily life even when it does not reduce deaths or hospital stays. The findings are preliminary, since they were presented as a research abstract that has not yet been peer-reviewed, and they will be published as a full manuscript in due course. The yoga heart failure trial gives Indian doctors a tested, low-cost option for patients who would otherwise get no rehabilitation at all.
Web story: Yoga Improves Life With Heart Failure, Big Trial Says