Can you literally step away from depression?
A new global review of data found that "increasing the number of daily steps, even at modest levels, was associated with a reduction in depressive symptoms."
The Spanish study found that up to a level of about 10,000 steps per day, the odds for depression decline as daily step levels rise.
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The findings were published Dec. 16 in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Researchers led by Estela Jimenez-Lopez, of the University of Castile-La Mancha, noted there's already solid evidence that exercise of any kind is a natural antidepressant. But what about something as easy as walking?
To find out, they looked at data from high-quality studies on daily step counts and their links to mental health.
In total, the new review covered 33 studies involving a total of more than 96,000 adults worldwide. Studies included people who used fitness-tracker devices to calculate their daily steps.
Compared to a baseline of 5,000 steps taken per day, folks who took even 1,000 more steps daily saw a 9% drop in their odds for developing depression, the researchers found.
Those benefits quickly mounted up: Compared to folks walking 5,000 steps per day or less, those who walked 7,000 steps/day had a 31% lower odds for depression, the study found.
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"In addition, counts above 7,500 steps/d were associated with a 43% lower prevalence of depression," Jimenez-Lopez and colleagues wrote, and those trends held true for "all age groups, [and] females and males."
There did seem to be a leveling out of mental health benefits at about 10,000 steps per day, the data showed.
As has been observed in studies on physical health, "increasing the number of steps [beyond 10,000/d] may not be associated with a significant reduction in depressive symptoms," the researchers wrote.
The new findings add walking to many other forms of physical activity — aerobics, weight training, yoga and even tai chi — as ways to help keep depression at bay, the researchers said.
The bottom line: "Setting goals for the number of daily steps may be a promising and inclusive public health strategy for the prevention of depression," the study authors concluded.