Exercise, Depression, and Anxiety: The Evidence

I am Dr Drew Ramsey. I am an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City, and I am reporting for Medscape Psychiatry.

Exercise is one of those recommendations clinicians love, but what is the evidence that it can help our patients with depression? There are wonderful new data from the HUNT Cohort Study (Nord-Trøndelag Health Study), which followed over 33,000 healthy individuals in Nord-Trøndelag, Norway, starting around 1985.^[1]

This is a very interesting study if you are thinking about recommending exercise to your patients. First, the evidence is now quite clear that exercise can help with the prevention of depression, and it is also a recommendation that patients like and can participate in right away.

In the HUNT Study, 33,908 people were followed over 11 years.^[1] Initially, these participants were screened very carefully to ensure that they were healthy, had no preexisting history of depression, and were not actively depressed.

The investigators then measured individual exercise habits and found that even exercising 1 or 1.5 times a week had a significant effect in preventing depression. Over the course of the study, about 7% of participants became depressed, and almost 9% developed an anxiety disorder.

Interestingly enough, exercise did not protect against anxiety; however, exercise did have an effect on depression.