One of the oft-repeated mantras from doctors and mental health professionals is that you need to stay active in your life. It helps combat everything from heart disease to depression. At least that’s been the conventional wisdom.
But a recent study questions this conventional wisdom and suggests, like virtually everything in life, it is more complicated than a simple mantra.
The new study, reported in Sunday’s USA Today, suggests that your genes help determine whether exercise is going to help improve your mood:
[The] study included questionnaires on exercise and evaluations of mental health every two years. Changes in exercise didn’t correlate with improvements or declines in mental health, he says. Even if one identical twin began exercising he didn’t become less depressed or anxious than his twin.
Instead, says [study researcher] DeGeus, the evidence points to common genes influencing both mental health and exercise behavior: The most mentally healthy tend to be active, and genes, not environment, largely determine who they will be. “I’m not saying exercise might not help someone’s mood. But it also may not work at all,” he says.
However, this new finding is in direct contradiction to a wealth of research that suggests that indeed exercise helps with a depressed mood (see, for example, van Gool et. al., 2007, which followed 1169 adults over 6 years and found that exercise throughout the 6 years was associated with the absence of a depressed mood and Smith et. al., 2007, among many others).
And some studies, such as Blumenthal et. al.’s (2007) study of 202 adults, show that exercise can be just as effective as psychiatric medications (and both exercise and medication are not significantly different than a sugar pill placebo!):
All treatment groups had lower HAM-D scores after treatment; scores for the active treatment groups were not significantly different from the placebo group (p=.23). Conclusions: The efficacy of exercise in patients seems generally comparable with patients receiving antidepressant medication and both tend to be better than the placebo in patients with MDD. Placebo response rates were high, suggesting that a considerable portion of the therapeutic response is determined by patient expectations, ongoing symptom monitoring, attention, and other nonspecific factors.
The fact that genes may interact with our ability to effectively treat depression should not be new news to anyone. The key here is to understand that if one treatment for depression doesn’t work for a particular person, they should try another. And despite this most recent study’s findings, exercise remains a useful tool to employ against depression (and it’s free, too!).
References:
Blumenthal, J.A. et. al. (2007). Exercise and pharmacotherapy in the treatment of major depressive disorder. Psychosomatic Medicine, Vol 69(7), 587-596.
Smith, P. J. et. al. (2007). Effects of exercise and weight loss on depressive symptoms among men and women with hypertension. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Vol 63(5), 463-469.
van Gool, C. H.; Kempen, G. I. J. M., & Bosma, H. (2007). Associations between lifestyle and depressed mood: Longitudinal results from the Maastricht Aging Study. American Journal of Public Health, Vol 97(5), 887-894.
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When I was briefly stuck in a mental institution–a house where we weren’t locked in, but spent most of our time inside–I was amazed at how sedentary they kept us. We ate three times a day, then did chores; we met in group (as a social phobic, I’m pathetic in groups); we met with individual counselors. In three days, we went on one trip to a park, where we sat under a tree; and on one short (less than a block) stroll. I may be relatively sedentary much of the time, but this level of inactivity made me feel physically horrible. In the psychiatric ward of a hospital where I stuck myself for a few days, we had one hallway to walk down, occupational therapy, group, and individual counseling. We had to earn the right to wear shoes (without laces), which meant that it was impossible to walk down the tiled hallway quickly (although you could sort of skate). I’ve wondered frequently if all institutions are similar. I couldn’t do an exercise class in front of other people (social phobia again), but there has to be some way to incorporate exercise into the experience of being stuck in an institution because of mental illness.