Putting a swing in their step could be just the thing to help ease the symptoms of depression in some Parkinson’s patients, a new study suggests.
Patients who took months of dance classes found their depression eased, a small study published recently in the Journal of Medical Internet Research says.
Not only did depression symptoms ease for the Parkinson’s patients , their brain scans displayed changes in their brain areas related to mood, researchers said.
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“It was very cool to see that dance had a positive effect on the mood circuits in the brain, which we could see in the imaging,” senior researcher Joseph DeSouza, an associate professor of neuroscience at York University in Toronto, Canada, said in a university news release.
“These improvements that we could see on MRI brain scans were also reported by the participants via survey,” DeSouza said. “Our study is the first to demonstrate these benefits across these two detection methods,” he also said, as news agency SWNS reported. The study followed 23 participants in the Sharing Dance Parkinson’s program at Canada’s National Ballet School who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease — as well as 1 1 healthy people , some of whom were relatives of the patients. The team measured mood and depression scores in all participants. Participants took weekly dance classes for eight months, which progressed from simple leg and foot work and pliés to interpretive movements, waltzes and more complicated, choreographed dances, the outlet reported.
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Researchers honed in on a node in the brain, the subcallosal cingulate gyrus (SCG), that has been shown in previous research to be implicated in depression.
The team measured mood and depression scores in all participants using a recognized scale before and after every class, plus they conducted regular MRI scans at York. After each dance class, they found that reported depression rates dropped — and the effect was cumulative from class to class, with “significant” improvements seen after eight months. The team also found that the MRI scans showed […]
Dance eases depression symptoms in Parkinson’s patients, new study suggests
