New Research Shows Regular Exercise May Lower Risk of Developing Anxiety by Almost 60%

upstart writes:

New Research Shows Regular Exercise May Lower Risk of Developing Anxiety by Almost 60%:

Anxiety disorders - which typically develop early in a person's life - are estimated to affect approximately 10% of the world's population and have been found to be twice as common in women compared to men.

And while exercise is put forward as a promising strategy for the treatment of anxiety, little is known about the impact of exercise dose, intensity or physical fitness level on the risk of developing anxiety disorders.

To help answer this question, researchers in Sweden recently published a study in Frontiers in Psychiatry to show that those who took part in the world's largest long-distance cross-country ski race (Vasaloppet) between 1989 and 2010 had a significantly lower risk" of developing anxiety compared to non-skiers during the same period.

The study is based on data from almost 400,000 people in one of the largest ever population-wide epidemiology studies across both sexes.

[...] We found that the group with a more physically active lifestyle had an almost 60% lower risk of developing anxiety disorders over a follow-up period of up to 21 years," said first author of the paper, Martine Svensson, and her colleague and principal investigator, Tomas Deierborg, of the Department of Experimental Medical Science at Lund University, Sweden.

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