Physical exercise for late life depression: effects on cognition and disability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Late-life depression is often associated with cognitive impairments and disability, which may persist even after adequate antidepressant drug treatment. Physical exercise is increasingly recognized as an effective antidepressant agent, and may exert positive effects on these features too. However, few studies examined this issue, especially by comparing different types of exercises. METHODS: We performed secondary analyses on data from the Safety and Efficacy of Exercise for Depression in Seniors study, a trial comparing the antidepressant effectiveness of sertraline (S), sertraline plus thrice-weekly non-progressive exercise (S+NPE), and sertraline plus thrice-weekly progressive aerobic exercise (S+PAE). Exercise was conducted in small groups and monitored by heart rate meters. Patients with late-life depression without severe cognitive impairment were recruited from primary care and assessed at baseline and 24 weeks, using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA, total and subdomain scores) and Brief Disability Questionnaire. Analyses were based on Generalized Linear Models. RESULTS: In total, 121 patients (mean age 75, 71% females) were randomized to the study interventions. Compared with the S group, patients in the S+PAE group displayed greater improvements of MOCA total scores (p=0.006, effect size=0.37), visuospatial/executive functions (p=0.001, effect size=0.13), and disability (p=0.02, effect size=-0.31). Participants in the S+NPE group did not display significant differences with the control group. CONCLUSIONS: Adding aerobic, progressive exercise to antidepressant drug treatment may offer significant advantages over standard treatment for cognitive abilities and disability. These findings suggest that even among older patients exercise may constitute a valid therapeutic measure to improve patients' outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".