A new study has found that exercise can reduce the symptoms of depression in young adults by amplifying reward processing, as Tom Walker reports

A study by Rutgers University suggests it could be possible to predict which young adults with major depression would benefit most from exercise.

The Rutgers-led team studied two groups of young adults with major depression, focusing on aerobic exercise and its impact on depressive symptoms.

For a period of eight weeks, one group undertook moderate-intensity aerobic exercise three times a week, while the other group did some light-intensity stretching.

Reduced depression
Symptoms of depression were reduced by 55 per cent in the aerobic exercise group, compared to 31 per cent in the light-intensity stretching group.

Crucially, while aerobic exercise didn’t influence reward processing or cognitive control, people with better reward processing when the study began were more likely to successfully respond to exercise treatment as a result of the exercise regime carried out.

The term ‘cognitive control’ refers to processes that allow adjustments in behaviour to help people achieve goals and resist distractions.

Reward processing (or reward-related brain activity) reflects the response to rewarding stimuli or outcomes and the ability to process and then modulate your response to positive and negative outcomes, such as achievement or loss.

Reward processing
Deficits in reward processing have been linked to multiple psychiatric conditions, including major depression. These deficits may reflect anhedonia – the loss of interest in or inability to experience pleasure – which can be found in many cases of depression.

“Our study needs to be replicated to investigate further, but the precision medicine approach of predicting who may or may not benefit from exercise as an antidepressant is provocative,” said senior author Brandon Alderman, an associate professor at Rutgers University. “We also need to know whether exercise has a similar antidepressant effect in younger adolescents and in adults with more treatment-resistant forms of depression who have not responded well to traditional treatments.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Medicine.

Find out more about this research at: www.HCMmag.com/rutgers