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The Effects Of An Eight Week Exercise Intervention On Brain Activity In Depressed And Non Depressed Individuals: A Fmri Pilot Study

PURPOSE: Memory deficits is the most frequently reported cognitive symptom in people suffering with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Supporting clinical findings, neuroimaging studies investigating memory impairment in people with MDD have identified brain areas such as the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobe to be dysregulated during both memory encoding and retrieval. Exercise for brain health has been a common research theme for the past several years. Research has found that exercise protects against the development of neurodegenerative diseases, reverses brain volume loss in the elderly, upregulates neurogenesis in rodents and improves learning and memory. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of an eight week exercise program on brain function during a memory task in people suffering with MDD and young healthy individuals. METHODS: Eight medicated patients with a clinical diagnosis of MDD based on DSM-IV criteria and eight healthy controls completed an eight week supervised exercise intervention. Participants performed an associative memory fMRI task matching names to faces pre and post the exercise intervention. Region of interest (ROI; anterior hippocampus) and whole-brain analyses were conducted to examine changes in brain function pre and post the exercise intervention. RESULTS: Following the eight weeks of exercise our ROI analyses revealed no group x time interaction, no main effect of group and a marginal main effect of time that did not reach significance. When examining the whole sample, collapsing across groups, increases in activity were present following the intervention in several regions, such as the basal ganglia, medial frontal and parietal lobe, and posterior cingulate. A regression analysis was conducted to determine if the change in activity pre/post was related to improvement in depression scores. We found those who showed the greatest improvement in depression scores had a reduction in activity in the left occipital and right motor regions. This finding suggests an improvement in sensory and motor processing. CONCLUSIONS: Our study shows that exercise can modulate brain activity during memory encoding in both healthy controls and those suffering from depression, which may be related to the reduction in symptoms shown in patients.