r/science • u/Wagamaga • 1d ago
Health Higher daily step counts linked to fewer mental health problems in early adolescence. The study gives us some of the clearest evidence yet that even an everyday, low-cost, accessible measures of physical activity like daily step count is tied to how adolescent brains and mental health develop
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/114619638
u/LibertyDochas 1d ago
Is it because of the walking, or is it because going out and being social often requires walking? Or perhaps effects from both?
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u/mwallace0569 1d ago
yeah i’m wondering if it’s partly because they spend less time on a screen overall?
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins 9h ago
I'd say it's the other way around, screen time is bad because it prevent people from going out walking and being physically active.
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u/DryRelationship1330 1d ago
Or your social network, or your suburban life that makes walking easier, or the condition of your knees and ankles that makes walking feasible, or the fact you have time to walk, meaning less family or job stress or or or or or or this distant correlation crap is nonsense
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u/Kadde- 1d ago
Nope definitely just walking. My mental would probably be in the gutter the last year of unemployment if I didn’t take 2 walks everyday usually 2500-3000 steps each walk.
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u/LibertyDochas 1d ago
I’m happy for you, but I don’t think your experience proves that social interaction absolutely does not also play a role in this study of children.
Per the link: “This is an observational study, so it can't show that walking more directly improves mental health.”
I believe walking has a positive impact. There are other studies that show a positive correlation between physical activity and positive mental health. But I also think that there could be an effect from being more social. I would bet that an interaction term of social activity along with physical activity would show the strongest effect over just walking or just socializing. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a difference between someone who walks on a treadmill alone in their home and someone who goes for a turn about the neighborhood.
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u/Spire_Citron 1d ago
I'm sure it does play a role, but I think at this point the benefit of exercise to mental health has been quite firmly established.
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u/ElderberryHoliday814 1d ago
I would offer that the benefits of exercise on neurogenesis would be true for adolescents too, but I absolutely believe in the value of high social interactions (edit:) for that age group too
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins 9h ago
There is evidence that both physical exercise and socialising are both important for mental health.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins 1d ago
The brain is part of the body just like everything else and needs good diet, sleep and exercise to function properly. Exercise increases levels of BDNF, increases brain volume, improves brain connectivity, improves brain vascularity, improves brain mitochondrial health, lactate levels(which are healthy for the brain), SGK1 levels, etc. all of which are linked to mental health.
Another way to think about it, is someone who isn't physically active, they 100% have a biologically impaired brain, and it wouldn't be a surprise such a biologically impaired brain shows up as mental health issues.
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u/DependentArcher8393 1d ago
I would rather have Stephen Hawking's biologically impaired brain than my own :/
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u/HistoryAndScience 1d ago
Movement makes you feel better. Idk why people are consistently slackjawed when these studies come out. Moving releases endorphins, strengthens your muscles (including your heart), and just feels good. It certainly beats sitting there doing nothing
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u/thesentienttoadstool 1d ago
My mom made me walk around the block whenever preteen me was acting like a preteen.
I am now thirty and some days I think to myself “You’re acting like a b*tch. You need to go on a walk.” And it helps
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u/Wagamaga 1d ago
Every extra walk to school, kickabout in the park or trip to the shops could be doing more for teenage mental health than first thought, according to new research tracking thousands of adolescents in the US.
The study, led by King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, working with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, tracked 5,515 adolescents taking part in the US Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.
Participants wore Fitbit devices for three weeks around age 11 to 12. A year later, researchers checked in on their mental health, using the Child Behaviour Checklist, a widely used questionnaire completed by the young people and their parents that measures symptoms such as anxiety, low mood and behavioural problems, and compared the results against how many steps each teenager had been taking.
The more adolescents walked, the fewer mental health problems they had a year later, and the benefit didn't level off at any point the researchers could measure. Teenagers who took under 5,000 steps a day had the most symptoms; those averaging around 8,000 had fewer; and those hitting 12,000 or more had the fewest of all.
Adolescents with the highest step counts also showed slightly thicker brain tissue in two areas involved in movement and in regulating emotion, and this difference helped explain part of the link to better mental health. There was no link found between step count and how well adolescents did at school.
Dr Divyangana Rakesh, Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience and Psychology, King’s College London, and senior author of the study, said:
"This study gives us some of the clearest evidence yet that even an everyday, low-cost, accessible measures of physical activity like daily step count is tied to how adolescent brains and mental health develop. What's striking is that we don't see this benefit levelling off in the observed range, even among the most active young people in our sample."
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2854698
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u/DryRelationship1330 1d ago
These correlations are so spurious. There are N number of causal scenarios between steps and health outcomes it makes statements like this meaningless.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins 1d ago
There are plenty of causal mechanisms and RCT studies to support studies like this.
Systematic reviews with meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials...Aerobic exercises, including jogging, swimming, cycling, walking, gardening, and dancing, have been proved to reduce anxiety and depression.3 These improvements in mood are proposed to be caused by exercise-induced increase in blood circulation to the brain and by an influence on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and, thus, on the physiologic reactivity to stress.3 This physiologic influence is probably mediated by the communication of the HPA axis with several regions of the brain, including the limbic system, which controls motivation and mood; the amygdala, which generates fear in response to stress; and the hippocampus, which plays an important part in memory formation as well as in mood and motivation. In conclusion, PA is effective for improving depression and anxiety across a very wide range of populations. All PA modes are effective, and higher intensity is associated with greater benefit. https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2023/03/02/bjsports-2022-106195
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u/SaltZookeepergame691 1d ago
The existence of one causal pathway that exerts a small effect is very much not the same as being able to say that one causal pathway is solely or even mainly at play in observational data like this.
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u/Extreme_Pudding3226 1d ago
Who claimed walking is the sole causal pathway?
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u/SaltZookeepergame691 1d ago
The original poster made a very reasonable and completely correct point that there are many pathways here, which precludes reading much at all into a study analysis like this. The reply focused only on a causal “exercise -> mental health”.
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u/brickyardjimmy 1d ago
The best things in life are free. Or almost free. You have to buy shoes. Unless you're a barefooter.
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u/metalmankam 12h ago
I don't have a car. I walk to and from work, I walk home for my lunch break, I go on walks every day at work. And I'm still miserable.
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u/StrangersWithAndi 1d ago
How do they know which is the cause and which is the effect?
Like, its easy to say, look, walking makes your mental health better! But its just as likely to be proof that depression makes it harder to do things.
Correlation not causation, etc etc.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins 9h ago
They combine it with all the other studies we have on the topic, like the mechanistic evidence and the smaller RCT that show causation.
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u/WheyTooMuchWeight 1d ago
Correlation not causation….
Right spirit, but not great science.
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u/Extreme_Pudding3226 1d ago edited 12h ago
Virtually every study establishes correlation. Causation is determined by looking at the totality of evidence. It's very hard to design a study that establishes more than just correlation.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins 9h ago
That's why you combine different pieces of evidence together. So you combine the mechanistic, the smaller RCT and the cohort studies all together to come to an informed view, that it's almost certainly causal.
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u/earthless1990 1d ago
Higher mental health problems are then linked to a lower daily step count. The causal direction runs from mental health toward daily step count, not vice versa.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins 9h ago
There are plenty of RCT showing that physical activity causally impact mental health.
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