| Since at least the 1980s, researchers have explored the power of exercise to fight off depression. Neuroscientist Jonathan Roiser had long been a skeptic of such notions but began to reconsider his position after the UK government let people outside for just an hour a day during Covid lockdowns to work out. "That made me look into, 'Is there any evidence based on this?'" recalls Roiser, a professor at University College London. He was surprised to find a growing body of research saying that, yes, exercise can help with depressive symptoms. And he was intrigued to learn that UK guidelines were already encouraging doctors to advise patients to consider activities like jogging, swimming and dance to enhance their sense of wellbeing. "Maybe as a result of Covid, people are getting more interested in this idea," says Rosier, whose research group has begun focusing on exercise's influence on the brain. In recent weeks, two new studies in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reinforced Rosier's newfound belief that exercise may play a powerful role in treating depression. The first, led by Andreas Heissel of the University of Potsdam in Germany, reviewed 41 of the most rigorous studies on the subject that included a combined 2,200 adults who've been diagnosed with major depressive disorder or shown clear depressive symptoms. The paper concluded that working out, especially aerobic exercise, is effective and should be offered as a treatment option. A similar review, led by Ben Singh of the University of South Australia, concluded that physical activity "should be a mainstay approach in the management of depression, anxiety and psychological distress." "Both of these papers tell us that exercise is good," says Patrick Jachyra, an assistant professor for sport and exercise sciences at Durham University in England. Jachyra was especially impressed with calculations in the papers that showed exercise may even be more powerful than antidepressant drugs and psychotherapy. There are, though, some caveats. First, exercise studies have long been plagued by the challenge of the placebo effect. In clinical drug trials, people generally don't know whether they're receiving the medicine that's being evaluated. But with exercise, people know they're regularly working out. (Psychotherapy faces the same challenge.) Another hurdle: for many people with depressive symptoms, working out is one of the last things they want to do. Yet Jachyra and Roiser — who were not involved in the new studies — are encouraged by signs that health officials around the world are beginning to embrace exercise as a preventative mental-health measure and as a treatment for depression. "If you could prevent people from getting depressed in the first place, through this very simple intervention, which is very cheap and scalable," Roiser says, "that could potentially have a big impact on the public mental health level." — Tim Loh | 
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