Deep breathing at six breaths per minute has been recently reported to be associated with a significant reduction in the frequency of premature ventricular complexes.1 Oxidative stress may contribute to the pathophysiology of many chronic diseases.2 Regular practice of pranayama balances between the concentration of reactive oxygen species and physiological antioxidants and maintaining better antioxidant status.3 The aim of the present study is to record the effect of the pranayama on the human genome in the practitioners and non-practitioners of Swami Ramdev Yog in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. Each year, 3000 to 4000 new cases of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) are diagnosed in the UK. Many genes involved in stress signalling molecules are found to be activated under conditions of modified breath in specific posture. Yog can play a useful role in patients with cancer. This experiment was designed to study gene-expression profiling for eight patients with RNA samples from whole blood using two replicates for each sample. In this study, we report on the profiling of ∼28 000 human genes before and after the Swami Ramdev Yog sequence in patients with leukaemia cancer by using the Expression Array System of Applied Biosystems (Foster City, California). Fifteen millilitres of blood was collected by venipuncture, in EDTA-containing tubes, from the study subjects as well as controls after informed consent. Total RNA samples obtained from the blood of all eight patients were processed into labelled cRNA using the Applied Biosystem Chemiluminescent RT-IVT labelling kit.

The practitioners included subjects in the age range of 18–55 years males and from the same socio-economic status, had comparable body weights (+10%), and were vegetarians and non-smokers. The fold change of control versus intervention group sample was analysed by filtering the dataset using p values <0.01 and a signal-to-noise ratio >3 for use in the ANOVA statistical analysis. Of these ∼28 000 genes, 69 genes were upregulated up to 16-fold, and 4428 genes were upregulated up to twofold in practitioners of seven sequences of Swami Ramdev Yog. We use the Spot fire software for the determination of fold changes for the differentially expressed genes. There was a significant increase in expression of AK, BC, NM BX, R-26 and hCG (p = 0.034) in practitioners of seven sequences of Swami Ramdev Yog as compared with the normal controls. This study is the first of its kind which reflects the significant effect on stress-related signalling pathways in the human body by the practice of pranayama. The observed upregulation of AK, BC, NM BX, R-26, hCG in Swami Ramdev Yog practitioners perhaps suggests a prolonged life span of WBCs by inhibition of apoptosis. Upregulation of antiapoptotic Bcl-2 along with Cox-2 gene expression in lymphocytes of Swami Ramdev Yog group also suggests a better immune regulation by prolonging the lifespan of lymphocytes in the practitioners.