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Listen to Fitness Rocks Podcast 118

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Exercise and Major Depression in Older Adults

Show Transcript:

Major depression is a disabling illness that affects an estimated 15 million adult Americans.  Children and adolescents are also affected.  An individual may have only one bout of major depression in a lifetime, or the episodes may be recurrent.

Symptoms of depression fall into a category that my medical school mentors called “nonspecific,” meaning that they are symptoms often associated with several diseases and are not specifically suggestive of a particular disease.  These symptoms include sustained feelings of sadness, hopelessness, irritability, and loss of one’s sense of self-worth.  Depressed people tend to lose interest in activities they previously enjoyed and feel tired much of the time.  Depression can cause a loss of concentration, difficulty sleeping or sleeping too much, a loss of appetite or overeating, chronic aches and pains, and thoughts of suicide.

If all of these symptoms of depression aren’t bad enough, depressed people are also at a significantly higher risk of dying prematurely from other causes, especially cardiovascular disease.

Depression appears to be related to a disorder within the brain, but the nature of this disorder has been difficult to elucidate.  It may be that there are different causes of depression in different people.  Genetics appear to have a role, but are not the only cause, and probably not even the biggest cause.  Abnormalities in the amounts or function of a host of brain chemicals seems to be a factor in depression, and common treatments involve drugs that alter brain concentrations of some of these chemicals, like serotonin.  Stressful life events can predispose a person to developing an episode of major depression, possibly as a consequence of the negative effects of elevated brain levels of the hormone cortisol.  Some people suffer from a form of depression called Seasonal Affective Disorder that is at least partially due to the decrease in exposure to sunlight in the winter.  Ten to fifteen percent of women are affected by depression after giving birth.

Here’s the good news:  Depression appears to be much less common among people who exercise regularly.  And, exercise has been shown to be an effective treatment in people who do become depressed.  A 1999 study in the Archives of Internal Medicine reported that regular aerobic exercise was as effective as a commonly used antidepressant drug (Zoloft) at treating major depression in a group of adults over age 50.  In this study, the exercise intervention was a vigorous 30-minute treadmill workout performed 3-times per week for 16 weeks.  This ability of exercise to relieve the symptoms of depression has been a consistent research finding.

If you have depression, or symptoms of depression, you should ask your doctor about exercise.