By MyHealthNewsDaily Staff

If you're stressed at work, a little yoga on your lunch break might just help.

A new study from the United Kingdom suggests yoga done at work can reduce stress levels and lower back pain.

The study involved 74 British government workers ages 25 to 64 who said they experienced stress and back pain that was somewhat bothersome. Participants were randomly assigned to practice either eight weeks of yoga, or no yoga.

People in the yoga group took part in a 50-minute yoga class once a week, either at lunchtime or after work. They could also practice yoga at home twice a week for 20 minutes using a DVD.

All participants completed questionnaires designed to assess back pain, stress levels and overall well-being.

At the beginning of the study, 10 people in the yoga group and eight in the control group said they had back pain. At the end of the study, just four participants in the yoga group reported back pain, compared to 13 in the control group.

In addition, participants in the yoga group had reported lower levels of stress and less sadness at the study's end, compared with those in the control group.

The findings agree with previous research showing that yoga can reduce stress levels and back pain.

The researchers, from the Bangor University in North Wales, noted that the majority of participants were women, so the findings may not apply to men. Also, the benefits in the yoga group may have been influenced by the placebo effect — the idea that a treatment is beneficial simply because patients believe it will work.

Future studies should examine whether yoga at work can reduce the number of sick days workers take, the researchers said.

"Integrating yoga into the workplace, at lunchtime or after work, may provide a time-effective, convenient and practical method for reducing the costly effects of stress and back pain," the researchers wrote in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Occupational Medicine.

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By MyHealthNewsDaily staff

Workplace environments continue to be blamed for causing or worsening cases of asthma, according to the latest survey of U.S. workers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 9 percent of adults who have asthma reported having work-related asthma, the CDC found from its telephone survey, which was conducted in 2006-09 and included information from 38 states and the District of Columbia. This would mean that 1.4 million people in the U.S. have work-related asthma.  

Florida had the highest proportion of adults with work-related asthma (14.1 percent), and Arizona the lowest (4.8 percent), according to the CDC, which will publish the results tomorrow (May 25) in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Black workers were found to be disproportionately affected, with 12.5 percent saying their asthma was work -related, compared with 8.2 percent of white workers. People ages 45 to 64 were the most likely to report suffering from the condition.

Work-related asthma is a preventable but often undiagnosed condition, the CDC says. It calls for an expanded effort to collect information on the condition so researchers can learn more about its triggers and how to prevent it. For instance, in years past, reducing the amount of powder in latex gloves led to a reduction of work-related asthma in the health care industry, the CDC says.

The report is based on a telephone survey of about 38,300 adults who have asthma. Because not all states were included in the survey, and because only landlines were used, the estimates may not be representative of the U.S. population as a whole, the CDC said.

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Kimberly-Clark Professional

Half of the microwave door handles in office break rooms are tainted, found a new study that examined 5,000 swabs taken from from offices.

Your co-workers may seem friendly but, if a study released today is any indication, they could be aircraft carriers for germs.

According to University of Arizona microbiologist Charles Gerba, who researches the environmental presence of infectious bacteria and viruses, employees in offices arrive in the morning, “put their stuff on their desks” where, he says, the germ payload is often more than you’d find on the typical toilet seat, “and then go to break rooms to get coffee. The two things you spread in a break room are office gossip and germs.”

Gerba consulted on the new study, conducted by a division of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation (which manufactures and sells cleaning and disinfectant supplies to businesses). For the study, researchers collected nearly 5,000 swabs from office buildings containing almost 3,000 employees over the course of two years to measure traces of possible contamination on office surfaces.

The study, which focused on office break rooms, found that 75 percent of break room faucet handles displayed a high degree of contamination as did nearly half of microwave oven handles, and a quarter of refrigerator door handles.

“The break room is really the center of germ transfer in the office rather than the individual cubicle," said Gerba. "Everything is shared in the break room.”

For example, he pointed out, many people rinse their coffee cups and push a sponge around the inside. Those sponges can be loaded with E. coli, “so you’re really wiping your mug with E. coli,” he said.

The second big break room habit that spreads germs is greeting co-workers. “Actually,” Gerba, explained, from a pathogen-transfer perspective, “you’d be better off kissing each other than shaking hands” because people cough or sneeze into their hands and transfer the germs when shaking.

In earlier work, Gerba documented that each person’s desktop environment is rife with germs like norovirus (which can cause diarrhea), parainfluenza (respiratory tract infections), and drug-resistant staph (MRSA).

The Kimberly-Clark study did not measure viruses and bacteria directly. It measured ATP, adenosine triphosphate, present in all organic matter. The presence of ATP means a surface contains some form of organic material, which could indicate either the presence of bacteria and viruses, or that something such as food residue is present that could provide a welcoming environment for germs.

The company has an obvious incentive to make workplaces sound germy, but, according to Gerba, they really are. “Those break rooms are as bad as we thought they were,” he said.

This doesn’t mean your office break room is necessarily a biohazard zone, or that you’re bound to get sick if you use it. It just means that any surfaces people touch are likely to be contaminated with something.

A simple solution, Gerba pointed out, is for companies to clean more carefully, and for employees to wash their hands, or use a hand sanitizer, more often. 

Read more:

The dirtiest places -- and how to clean them up 
E. Coli found on 50 percent of shopping carts
Reusable grocery bag carried nasty norvirus, scientists say

Brian Alexander is co-author, with Larry Young Ph.D., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," to be published Sept. 13.