Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is the most common chronic gastrointestinal (GI) disorder with bowel habit variations, chronic abdominal pain and lack of structural symptoms. Moreover, patients with IBS usually suffer from anxiety and depression and this disease mostly affected their quality of life. So, effective treatment is very important to reduce the complications of the disease. Combination of psychological approaches and pharmacological treatments can be significantly effective for IBS therapy. Among the psychotherapeutic approaches, behavioral therapy is more recommended and one of the new strategies in this area is laughter yoga that has been widely shown to have a positive impact on both body and mind. The main objective of the present study was to provide a therapeutic plan based on laughter yoga and anti-anxiety medication that was operated for the very first time and also determining the effectiveness of these treatments on anxiety and gastrointestinal symptoms of patients with irritable bowel syndrome.

: In this randomized trial, the participants were 60 patients with irritable bowel syndrome that were diagnosed on the basis of Rome-III diagnosis criteria and randomly assigned to one of the groups of laughter yoga,anti-anxiety medication and control group or symptomatic treatment. The severity of anxiety and gastrointestinal symptoms before and after the interventions determined and compared in these three groups according to approved protocols. Finally the obtained data were analyzed through SPSS software.

: Laughter yoga has a significant effect on IBS symptoms reduction and mental health promotion of the patients. The finding revealed that the severity of IBS symptoms after the interventions more reduced in the laughter yoga group than anti-anxiety medication and control groups and the difference was statistically significant (p=0.006).Also the severity of anxiety after interventions decreased in all three groups especially in yoga treatment group but this difference was not statistically significant(p=0.1).

According to the results of this study, laughter yoga is more effective than the anti-anxiety medication to reduce gastrointestinal symptoms of patients with irritable bowel syndrome. Therefore, applying cognitive-behavioral therapy such as laughter yoga along with common pharmacological therapies for IBS patients might be strongly advised.