Alison Alekperova
Psychology 215
Professor Fanelli
May 15th, 2014
Depression is a common and disabling illness, affecting millions of people around the world. Along with having a strong negative influence on a person physically, it also reduces the quality of life for them severely. Through various research it is shown that medication and rigorous psychological therapy has an effect in the treatment of depression. Although these methods were tested and are currently used, many prefer alternatives to medications in order to avoid any possible side effects that come with them. Some researchers suggest that exercise would be an effective alternative for those who are not in favor of medication. The design of this study was a meta-analysis study, where researchers focus on contrasting and combining results from different studies, in order to identify a specific pattern within the results. In this study, Cooney et all. (2013) contrasted the depression level of participants who exercised with those who took medication or went through psychological therapy. The design is also a cohort study, a form of longitudinal study, where research study that involves repeated observations of the same variables over long periods of time, and the comparison group may be thought to have had little or no exposure to the substance under investigation, but otherwise similar. Alternatively, subgroups within the cohort may be compared with each other. Some of the constructs within this study is depression, health, fitness, and self-esteem. Health and fitness were measured by the amount of exercise the participants engaged in and depression was measured by how much the participants mood changed after engaging in the exercises. The extraneous variables within this study were the psychological therapy and the medication administered to other groups of patients. They were controlled throughout trials of the experiment. After the exercise was administered, participants also tried medication and psychological therapy in order to see which one was most effective. The main idea of this study is to see if exercising
had an effect on depression, and although this is a good comparison to see if there is a significant difference; factors such as not responding well to the medication and having no beneficial outcomes from the therapy can alter to comparative results. The hypothesis of this study was that there would be little to no effect amongst exercising, medication, and psychological therapy and depression. There would also be a moderate effect between depression and exercising as opposed to no treatment at all. The objective of this study was to find out the effectiveness of exercise in the treatment of depression in adults compared with no treatment or a comparator intervention(medication or psychological therapy). The data was analyzed through various trials. Randomized controlled trials in which exercise was compared to standard treatment, no treatment or a placebo treatment, pharmacological treatment, psychological treatment or other active treatment in adults (aged 18 and over) with depression. Thirty-nine trials (2326 participants) fulfilled the experiment. The results stated For the 35 trials (1356 participants) comparing exercise with no treatment, the primary outcome of depression at the end of treatment was -0.62 (95% confidence interval (CI) -0.81 to -0.42), indicating a moderate clinical effect. Pooled data from the eight trials (377 participants) providing long-term follow-up data on mood found a small effect in favor of exercise (SMD -0.33, 95% CI -0.63 to -0.03). Seven trials compared exercise with psychological therapy (189 participants), and found no significant difference (SMD -0.03, 95% CI -0.32 to 0.26). Four trials (n = 300) compared exercise with pharmacological treatment and found no significant difference (SMD -0.11, -0.34, 0.12). One trial (n = 18) reported that exercise was more effective than bright light therapy (MD
