Lisa Uebelacker, PhD
People taking medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) commonly experience chronic pain. Yoga interventions have shown promise for decreasing pain-related disability in other populations.
Although more yoga practice (i.e., higher “dosage”) may improve pain-related outcomes, there is very little known about how to support more yoga practice for people with chronic pain taking MOUD. A 3-site study team used the Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST) to learn about the contributions of four candidate intervention components to time spent in yoga practice, then create an optimized yoga intervention package that maximizes dosage in this population. We implemented a 2x2x2x2 factorial experiment to test four intervention components as supplements to a weekly online synchronous yoga class: 1) personal practice videos featuring the study’s yoga teachers, 2) two private sessions with a yoga teacher, 3) daily text messages to inspire personal practice, and 4) monetary incentives for class attendance. We enrolled 192 adults from three states with chronic pain who are taking MOUD.
The primary outcome was minutes per week of yoga practice, which included both minutes in study classes and time spent in personal yoga practice. We fit a zero-inflated negative-binomial (ZINB) model to determine which combination of intervention components resulted in the highest number of minutes per week engaged in yoga practice. In this webinar, I will discuss challenges encountered and solutions that we implemented, preliminary results, and interpretation of these results.