Physical Exercise: Better than Antidepressants
Excerpt from the article "Vivez-santé, vivez heureux"
Le Journal de Montréal, March 22, 2001

A major study, published in Psychosomatic Medicine, demonstrates the effectiveness of physical exercise in the treatment of depression.
The study was carried out by researchers from Duke University in Northern Carolina. It involved 156 people, all having been diagnosed with major depression.
The subjects were divided into three different groups. The first group took a well-known antidepressant (Zoloft). The second group did some physical exercise. The third group did physical exercise as well as taking the antidepressant.
The exercise sessions involved using a treadmill or a stationary bicycle. The intensity of the effort was set at 85% of the maximum heart rate of each person. We know that this rate is determined each person's age. Each session lasted 30 minutes and was repeated three times a week.
Initially, the study lasted 16 weeks. At the end of this period, each of the three groups showed a similar improvement. At this time, the researchers concluded that physical exercise is as efficient as antidepressants in treating severe depression.
They continued the study for another six-month period. This is when the effectiveness of physical exercise as a method for treating depression became quite obvious. At the end of this period, the researchers evaluated the percentage of individuals who had a relapse.
Among those individuals who exercised, 8% experienced a relapse of their depression. Of those who took the antidepressant, 38% fell back into depression. Among the individuals who did both the exercises and took the antidepressant, the depression came back in 31% of the cases.
These statistics are particularly interesting. First of all, it is clear that in the long term, physical exercise is a better therapy for depression than antidepressants. There's nothing really surprising about this fact since physical exercise is a natural factor of health while there's noting natural about antidepressants.
But what really confused the researchers was that physical exercise in conjunction with antidepressant medication was less efficient than exercise alone. They expected that combining the two methods would give the best results.
How can this be explained? One hypothesis is that antidepressants treat depression in the short term but favor its return on the more or less long term.

Excerpt from a letter from Marie de L. Campeau
St-Télesphore, Quebec, Octobre 16, 1997

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