Taking a few thousand steps a day is obviously a good way to stay in shape. But what if it was also a way to fight depression?
The authors of a systematic review, that is to say a synthesis of studies, managed to find no less than 33 studies on the question totaling 96,000 people using a telephone, a connected watch, a pedometer or another device to calculate their movements. And the bottom line: those who reported the most steps — at least 5,000 per day — were less likely to report depressive symptoms or have a depression diagnosis.
Beyond the threshold of 7,500 daily steps, these people would be 42% less likely to suffer from depressive symptoms. A subset of these studies estimates that the risk would decrease by 9% with each additional thousand steps.
The study was published in December in JAMA Network Opena medical journal whose research is published open access.
As with any study of this type, there may be other factors at work. People who have the time and energy to walk more may be the ones who experience depression less often beforehand. The researchers wanted to get around this obstacle by excluding from their list of studies those that focused on people who already suffered from depression beforehand. But they acknowledge that they cannot rule out the possibility that people who have not been diagnosed, but do suffer from one form or another of depression, would initially be less inclined to want to make the effort to get started. in shape.
However, this is not the first time that a positive association has been made with physical exercise. In a meta-analysis published in January 2024 in the British Medical Journalit was concluded that exercise reduced depression as much as antidepressants—although not in all groups. One of the recommendations of the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) is precisely to do 150 minutes per week of “moderate” physical activity.
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