Mental health treatment is difficult. Most drugs come with side effects that range from irritating to downright upsetting, and other options are often based more on wishful thinking than proven medicine. It becomes even more appealing when there is news that depression can be treated by just running a few times a week.as heading In the world Recent studies seem to show that running therapy is as effective as medication in treating depression.
There’s a simple rule to always remember when reading headlines like this. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Although exercise probably helps treat mental health problems to some extent, there is not enough evidence that running is as effective as SSRIs such as Prozac or Lexapro.
This study made headlines everywhere. New book Published in the Journal of Affective Disorders. The research itself was very easy. The authors described the paper as a “partially randomized patient preference” study. In practice, this consisted of taking people with depression and anxiety and giving them a choice of their preferred treatment, either standard antidepressants or running therapy. Running therapy consisted of group running with a trainer two to three times a week for a total of four months.
At the end of four months, the authors reported, there was “no difference” between the two treatments. Significantly on mental health outcomes” (emphasis mine). However, the running group lost a little more weight and felt a little healthier, leading to the recommendation that “exercise therapy should be considered a standard treatment for people with depression and anxiety disorders.” Hence the heading. “Running can be as effective as taking medication to overcome depression.” declared New York Post. This article contains the following quote from the paper’s first author: “Both interventions improved depression to about the same extent.”
However, if we look at this paper a little more closely, we find that running equivalent The drug seems to have completely disintegrated. First, the groups were not fully randomized. That means they can’t categorize people into treatment groups and let them choose for themselves which treatments they want to try, as researchers have done. This is a problem because it means that people who choose one treatment or the other may vary widely, potentially explaining differences in depression outcomes at the end of the study. In fact, a closer look at the paper found that those who chose to take the medication were significantly more depressed and anxious than those who chose running therapy. Honestly, this is obvious when you think about it. A person who really suffers from depression may not want to go running more than once a week.
There is also a small problem with the word “significantly” mentioned above. The authors correctly reported that statistical tests showed no problems. statistically significant The difference between running and medications to reduce depression and anxiety. However, looking at the appendix, it appears that those who took the drug improved their depression/anxiety scores by an average of about twice as much as those who ran. It is true that this effect may not be statistically significant with the tests used by the researchers. In fact, the study was so small, with just 141 people, that it’s hard to know what the results mean at all. A more correct interpretation is that the drug treatment was twice as effective as running in the study, but we don’t know if that’s random noise or a real effect. The sample size is too small to say either way.
Overall, the study itself is very weak. Not only was it non-randomized and very small, the authors had pre-registered a very different protocol just four years before his. (Practice of Pre-registration This helps hold authors accountable and allows us to ask the question, did the researchers actually do what they set out to do, or were they just fiddling with the data until they got it? . Any Interesting results, even weak results?) In 2019, they published the protocol In the very same study, instead of looking at depression and anxiety scores, the primary outcomes of interest were “biological aging, metabolic stress, and neurobiological abnormalities.” The 2019 protocol also included a control group of people without mental health problems. The statistical analysis plan in the original protocol also does not mention the final analysis performed by the authors. This type of discrepancy is often a symptom of a practice called selective reporting or result switching. Known to significantly skew clinical trial results.
Therefore, the results of this particular test are almost completely unreliable. What does the rest of the literature show?
Frankly, this study is spot on. Other studies on exercise for depression in general include: very low quality. According to a 2013 Cochrane reviewUsually considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine, of the 39 trials published to that point on the subject, only six had passed even minimal quality checks. Looking at just these six half-baked papers, people who received exercise therapy showed only very small improvements in their depressive symptoms at best. Few trials compared exercise and drug therapy for these conditions, and none were reliable. A more recent review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine caused a commotion Earlier this year, it argued that exercise should be the “go-to approach” for managing depression, much of it rehashing the same evidence from the 2013 Cochrane review.
Ultimately, this new study adds little new to our understanding of exercise and running as treatments for mental health problems. As far as these results tell us, they do seem to show that medication is more effective than running two or three times a week, but even those results are highly questionable. .
As you read this exam, one special result of this exam stands out. Of her 96 people who chose running therapy, half stopped running within her four months. One thing he could gain from this paper is that even highly motivated people choose Many people who try therapy for mental health issues quickly stop therapy. Meanwhile, 82 percent of those who took the drug remained compliant at the same time.
This isn’t to say that running or other forms of exercise aren’t worth trying at all if you’re feeling anxious or depressed.If you can Exercise may also help your mental health to some extent. Frankly, every study we’ve ever done suggests that exercise is good for your physical and mental health. However, the evidence also seems to show that exercise as a practical intervention has limited applicability to real people in the real world. And so far there’s no good reason to believe it’s just as effective. medicine.
state of mind is a partnership of slate and arizona state university It provides a practical perspective on our mental health system and how to improve it.
