What Kind of Exercise Is Best for Depression?

exercise do we need more evidence of its benefits why not that's the topic of this week's Healthcare [Music] triage this will be at least the third video over Healthcare triages lifetime that I have said something on the order of this other than smoking there are few modifiable risk factors that seem to have as much of an impact on health as physical exercise does we've got good data on how beneficial exercise is for physical health it improves outcomes for people with osteoarthritis in the knee and rheumatoid arthritis diabetes and chronic pulmonary obstructive disease or COPD exercise therapy can reduce not just death from cardiac diseases but death from all causes and a patient suffering from Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis exercise improves Health rated quality of life measures like physical function it helps with chronic fatigue even an individual suffering from fatigue due to cancer treatments and then of course there's mental Health which gets a huge Boost from exercise and that's what we're zeroing in on for this episode looking at the literature the positive effect of exercise on mental health is pretty clear but the details are a bit fuzzy some data suggest that intensity and type of exercise matter while other data do not to examine these questions further a recent systematic review and metaanalysis has attempted to give us more insights to the research published in February of 2024 the study compared exercise to psychotherapy anti-depressants and controls as a treatment for major depression it examined the results of 218 studies with over 14,000 total participants above 18 years of age when compared to controls like a placebo tablet exercise resulted in a moderately larger decrease in depression this held true for walking or jogging yoga strength training and exercise like taiichi but the strongest effects were seen for strength training and yoga the effects of all EX exercise were proportional to intensity meaning the more intense the exercise the greater the decrease in depression the anti-depressant effects of strength training and cycling appear to be larger for women while the effects of yoga taiichi and aerobic exercise appear to be larger for men older participants appeared to benefit more from yoga and aerobic exercise while younger participants saw more benefit with strength training the delivery of the exercise may have a small impact as well with exercise like yoga having greater effects in a group setting and exercises like strength training and mixed aerobics having greater effects in an individual setting while this held true across people with different health issues and different levels of depression at Baseline it's important to note that many of the studies were judged to have some level of bias which does lower confidence in the overall conclusions the bias was largely related to expectancy effects which were a result of not blinding researchers and participants to the conditions while all trials examined in this meta analysis is were randomized and controlled they were not restricted to trials that blinded the conditions when people participating in experiment know which group they're in meaning they're not blinded to whether they're getting the experimental treatment or the placebo their reports in this case of depression levels can change based on what they expect the treatment or Placebo to do and in the case of researchers what they rate record Etc may change for the same reasons if they know which condition their participants are in another issue is that not all studies included both men and women and not all studies included a range of Ages making the conclusions on sex and age harder to pin down with accuracy however even given these kinds of limitations the evidence based for exercise is strong enough overall that we feel comfortable advocating for it as one of the Frontline treatments for both physical and mental health but exercise isn't often viewed as fun by most people so what does the research say about getting people to exercise we have a video on that too too hey did you enjoy this video you might enjoy this previous video on how most Americans exercise what about you we'd appreciate it if you'd like the video subscribe to the channel down below and consider going to patreon.com healthcar triage where you can help support the show make it bigger and better we'd especially like to thank our research Associates Joe sevitz and Edward lolm and of course our surgeon amiral Sam