RESEARCH ARTICLE
Physical Activity in Depressed Elderly. A Systematic Review
Gioia Mura 1, Mauro Giovanni Carta1, 2, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2013Volume: 9
First Page: 125
Last Page: 135
Publisher ID: CPEMH-9-125
DOI: 10.2174/1745017901309010125
Article History:
Received Date: 24/3/2013Revision Received Date: 6/6/2013
Acceptance Date: 7/6/2013
Electronic publication date: 12/7/2013
Collection year: 2013
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Background:
exercise may reduce depressive symptoms both in healthy aged populations and in old patients diagnosed with MDD, but few specific analysis were conducted on the efficacy of exercise as an adjunctive treatment with antidepressants, which may be probably more useful in clinical practice, considered the high prevalence of treatment resistant depression in late life, the low cost and safety of physical activity interventions.
Objective:
to establish the new findings on the effectiveness of exercise on depression in elderlies, with particular focus on the efficacy of the exercise as an adjunctive treatment with antidepressants drug therapy.
Method:
the search of significant articles was carried out in PubMed/Medline with the following key words: “exercise”, “physical activity”, “physical fitness”, “depressive disorder”, “depression”, “depressive symptoms”, “late life”, “old people”, and “elderly”.
Results:
44 papers were retrieved by the search. Among the 10 included randomized controlled trials, treatment allocation was adequately conceived in 4 studies, intention-to-treat analysis was performed in 6 studies, but no study had a double-blinded assessment. We examined and discussed the results of all these trials.
Conclusion:
in the last 20 years, few progresses were done in showing the efficacy of exercise on depression, due in part to the persistent lack of high quality research, in part to clinical issues of management of depression in late life, in part to the difficult to establish the real effectiveness of exercise on depressive symptoms in elderlies. However, there are some promising findings on physical activity combined with antidepressants in treatment resistant late life depression.
