Healthy Discoveries: Exercise unlikely to lift depression long-term

Healthy discoveries

According to a new review of large studies investigating the relationship between exercise and depression, exercise appears to have little long-term effect on depression.
As long as people with depression were taking part in an exercise program, it appeared to have a small effect on their indications - but months after the intervention ended, they were just as depressed as people who did not take part in the exercise program.


Study author Dr. Jesper Krogh at Bispebjerg University Hospital in Denmark told Reuters Health he was surprised to see exercise had no long-term effect on depression. "I expected that patients that had availed from the intervention would stay well," he said.
Overall, "the impact on depression is at best small, if any," he noticed.


However, this doesn't mean that exercise isn't beneficial to people who are depressed. People with depression are also at a higher risk of dying from heart sicknesses and diabetes, and for these conditions, there is "solid documentation" that supports the benefits of exercise. "Therefore, exercise is important in this population," Krogh said.


About 17% of people living in Western countries develop depression at some point in their lives.


Previous research has suggested that exercise could have an effect on depression, at least in the short term. In a 2007 study of about 202 depressed adult people, researchers found that those who went through group-based exercise treatment did as well as those treated with an antidepressant drug. In the same year, another small study found that regular exercise bettered depression symptoms in people who've failed to get better with antidepressant medication.


The present-day study, in contrast, looked at data collected from only large studies, some of which measured exercise's long-term effect by following patients for months after the intervention concluded.
The analysis, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, is established on 13 studies including about 700 patients, half of whom were randomly assigned an exercise intervention to help with their depression.


On average, people showed that they have improved slightly by the end of the exercise intervention, relative to people who did not exercise.


However, according to the 5 studies that followed patients for between 6 and 26 months, the benefits of exercise didn't appear to last once the program finished. "If exercise was a pill, I don't think the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) would agree it as an antidepressant," he said.


Perhaps, Krogh suggested in an e-mail, exercise itself has indirect impacts on depression that only last while people are doing it. "Maybe the impact of the intervention isn't related to the physical exercise but to an component of structure in the daily lives of depressed patients," Krogh noted. Some of the benefits, he noted, may include "meeting at regular intervals with other patients and staff that know the troubles of living with depression."

If you like this article, please feed our RSS and share it now :)