Study Shows Exercise May Help Ease Depression

For many years there has been a lot of talk about how exercise might help those suffering from depression, but until now no one it appears, has bothered to seriously test this theory. Now Dr. Madhukar H. Trivedi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and several of his colleagues have found that in a test environment, some patients did just as well with exercise as did a group with a secondary dose of antidepressants. The group has published its results in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (see references).

The reason that no one has tried to test whether exercise can help with depression is because of the large number of variables that can skew the results. As just one example, if a group of depressed patients is taken for a long walk every morning and then they all start to seem less depressed, is it due to the exercise, being with a group of fellow walkers or simply from being outside and enjoying the natural benefits that nature has to offer.

Nonetheless, the team decided to try to see if they could find out if exercise does indeed help with depression; they gathered a group of volunteers, all of whom were diagnosed with depression. They were all already on antidepressants as well and were likely candidates for a secondary medication to boost the first. They divided the volunteers into two groups. One group was put on an “easy” aerobic regimen, while the second group was put on a more rigorous routine. After four months, all of the volunteers were tested.

The research team found that nearly 25% of the volunteers from both groups experienced improvements in their symptoms, a level that is consistent with results obtained by giving depressed patients a secondary medication.

There were some issues with the study however; the first of which was there was no control group. The second was that a lot of the volunteers dropped out of the study before it was completed, highlighting one of the real issues with prescribing exercise to depressed patients. When someone is in the throes of depression, the last thing they feel like doing is getting up and exercising. Thus, even if exercise does help with depression, there still remains the problem of how to get patients to do it.

Regardless of its limitations, the study does suggest that exercise may help people in alleviating the symptoms of depression, and since it’s basically free, and doesn’t have any side effects, there seems to be little reason to not offer it as a suggestion to patients, some of whom might find it helps them.


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