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Regular exercise reduces depressive symptoms, improves self-esteem in overweight children |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Less than an hour of daily exercise reduces depressive symptoms and improves self esteem in overweight children, Medical College of Georgia researchers say. The study included 207 overweight, typically sedentary children ages 7-11 randomly assigned to either continue their sedentary lifestyle or exercise for 20 or 40 minutes every day after school for an average of 13 weeks. "Just by getting up and doing something aerobic, they were changing how they felt about themselves," says the study's first author, Dr. Karen Petty, postdoctoral fellow in psychology at MCG's Georgia Prevention Institute. Dr. Petty works with Dr. Catherine Davis, clinical health psychologist at the Georgia Prevention Institute, who has shown that regular physical activity not only improves fitness and reduces fatness but also reduces insulin resistance (diabetes risk), improves cognition and reduces anger expression. "This adds to the evidence that exercise is great for people of all ages, physically and mentally," Dr. Davis says of the latest finding. One exception was that even a longer daily exercise regimen did not impact the general self esteem of black adolescents although it did improve their depressive symptoms and how they felt about how their appearance. For this study, children filled out the Self-Perception Profile for Children and the Reynolds Child Depression Scale reports before and after the13-week period. The researchers already are following another group of children for eight months to determine the longer term impact of exercise. They also are bringing the control subjects to the Georgia Prevention Institute each day to ensure that it's exercise, not just the extra attention from participating in an after-school program, that's making the difference.
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