ONE OF THE BEST STUDY'S FOR DEPRESSION
- Travis Hansen
- Feb 9
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 9
I suppose I may be guilty of a bit of clickbait with the title, but perhaps not, for a couple of reasons. First, people need to understand and appreciate the nature of valid research; also, exercise may very well be one of the best allies in treating depression.
Enter Dr. Mark Hyman
If you haven't followed his work or read his book, "Ultra-metabolism," then I would strongly encourage you to do so. Dr. Hyman is undoubtedly one of the best scientists when it comes to human nutrition and its role in preventing and treating disease, which obviously includes mental health, to say the least. He's taught me so much about the intricacies of our metabolism, and he just keeps churning out quality content that he shares with the masses.
The Cochrane Review
As I alluded to earlier, the quality of research reporting and referencing is essential in determining whether or not information is true. For example, just nitpicking one random study isn't nearly enough to validate a claim. Rather, we should always be considering a "meta-analysis" or "systematic review" when it comes to approving information. With that being said, Dr. Hyman recently shared The Cochrane Review, which factored in 73 different studies examining what works best for depression.
The Results
Researchers took 5000 people and assessed levels of depression using exercise, antidepressants, and therapy comparisons. What they found is that exercise did as good of a job of alleviating symptoms as antidepressants and therapy did. Pretty cool stuff. The main reasons are that exercise helped balance neurotransmitter levels, reduced inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor) specifically. Not really groundbreaking news, but the key is that there were 73 studies looking at all of this, which makes the findings very hard to dismiss or override.
Limitations
The most obvious limitation here is that the study only consisted of 5000 people. It's not really fair to extrapolate results with such a small sample size for the masses, but it is a great start. Everyone can appreciate the value of exercise for mental health purposes, but we definitely may be undermining the vast benefits associated with it psychologically. Furthermore, we are a very obese and lazy society so if more people genuinely became accountable and engaged in strenuous physical activity with all else constant, I'm pretty confident that the results would in large part reflect the results of this study. Last but not least, the trials did not receive any grant funding which isn't surprising and long-term follow up was rare.
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