MGH Study: Regular Aerobic Exercise May Help Prevent Depression Onset

You’ve probably experienced the mood-boosting effects of exercise after a rousing game of tennis, a night of dancing, or a brisk walk with a dear friend. Your outlook seemed brighter, more optimistic, even if it was just for a shortÊtime.

And if you think about it, there have probably been times in your life when you were less active and your mood dipped. A sedentary lifestyle is often associated with low energy and a depressed outlook.

The connection between exercise and depression is a well-studied relationship. Yet questions linger. Does being more physically active actually reduce depression risk? Or is it that being depressed simply results in less exercise?

A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers may have some answers. In a study published recently in JAMAPsychiatry, researchers focused on gene variants related to exercise. A gene variant is a variation or abnormality in the DNA sequence of a genomeÑthe complete set of genetic material in an organism or cell. A gene variant may be harmless or even help protect you from certain diseases. Some gene variants, however, may raise your risk of developing a serious medical condition.

“Using genetic data, we found evidence that higher levels of physical activity may causally reduce risk for depression,” says Karmel Choi, PhD, of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit at MGH’s Center for Genomic Medicine.

Genes and Depression Risk

The idea in the MGH study was that if exercise actually lowers a person’s risk of developing depression, then a person with a gene variant that increases exercise would be less likely to get depressed. They also wondered whether people with a gene variant that makes them more likely to develop depression would also be less likely to exercise.

The researchers used information from international patient databases involving more than 300,000 individuals. The findings suggest that people with the genetic marker that made them more likely to exercise did, in fact, have lower depression risks. However, participants carrying the variant linked to higher depression risk were not necessarily less likely to exercise. In simple terms, exercise may help protect against depression, but depression does not necessarily make one less inclined to exercise.

Interestingly, the researchers found that people who didn’t exercise regularly faced a higher risk of depression.

“While gene variants like those used in this study do not determine a person’s behaviors or outcomes, their average associations with certain traits in these very large studies can help us look at a question such as whether physical activityÑor the tendency to engage in more physical activityÑhas a likely causal effect on depression,” says senior author Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD, director of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit and a professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “And the answers to those questions could help researchers design large-scale clinicalÊ trials.”

The Challenge of Exercise

Getting someone with depression to exercise, eat right and stick to a healthy lifestyle isn’t always easy. You may be depressed and know that you’d probably feel better if you were more active. But the motivation isn’t there.

“It’s one thing to know that physical activity could be beneficial for preventing depression; it’s another to actually get people to be physically active,” acknowledges Dr. Choi. “More work needs to be done to figure out how best to tailor recommendations to different kinds of people with different risk profiles.”

Dr. Choi says that if you can replace sitting with at least 15 minutes of heart-pumping activity daily, such as a brisk walk, you could help cut your depression risk.

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