Northeastern researchers looked at the link in children ages 8 to 11 in one of the first studies looking at these relationships in this population.
Obesity rates have climbed over the last several decades, as have mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression. This is especially the case among children, but this particular population has not been closely researched when it comes to these issues.
A new study from Northeastern University researchers looked into this and found there is a relationship between lower body fat and higher aerobic fitness and decreased symptoms of anxiety and depression in children.
“The purpose of this analysis was to look at the implications of body composition and physical fitness,” said Lauren Raine, an assistant professor of physical therapy, movement and rehabilitation and medical sciences at Northeastern University and one of the authors on the paper. “It turns out that aerobic fitness and lean mass were both protective against negative mental health outcomes.”
The research, published in JAMA Network, began in 2019 and continued through 2023. The research team had over 200 healthy children between the ages of 8 and 11 answer standardized questionnaires about their mental health, particularly when it came to feelings of anxiety and depression. The answers were self-reported by the children to encourage honest answers.
Researchers then measured the children’s body composition, looking at the adipose tissue, commonly known as body fat, surrounding their internal organs.
The researchers then tested the physical fitness of the participants with a maximal exercise test in which the participants ran on a treadmill until fatigued. The participants wore a mask that allowed the researchers to gauge the amount of oxygen the children used while exercising to determine fitness levels.
Over the course of four years, Raine said they collected a large set of data on body composition, fitness and mental health outcomes that they were able to analyze for further relationships. The researchers controlled for factors like socioeconomic status, puberty development and sex.
What they found was that children with less adipose tissue and better physical fitness reported fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety, while children with more body fat and lower physical fitness levels had worse symptoms.
This was also significant given that all the participants involved were healthy and did not have a diagnosis of depression or anxiety, Raine said.
“This is all basically sub diagnosis levels, but we’re seeing that even with increased lean mass, we see decreasing symptoms for these mental health outcomes,” she added. “This is exciting to me personally because I study physical fitness and body composition and how it affects health. And so to see it in the mental health space, it’s exciting to me particularly that fitness and lean mass might be protective. There are specific interventions to increase somebody’s fitness, increase their lean mass and decrease their adipose tissue that might move the needle on this.”
The research came from a National Institutes of Health grant obtained by Charles Hillman, professor of psychology and movement science and director of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Health. It builds off Hillman’s ongoing work over the last 25 years examining the role of lifestyle choices on the brain and cognition, though the idea to study fitness and body composition as it relates to mental health outcomes was Raine’s.
“The main aim of the actual study is to understand how acute doses of exercise influence a potential mechanism for the beneficial effects that we’ve observed in brain and cognition for many years,” Hillman said. “Coming out of the back end of COVID, a lot of people talk about that pandemic, understandably so. But what’s discussed less frequently is that there are other pandemics that we’re currently experiencing and those are the rise of chronic diseases, such as obesity. Other chronic diseases like anxiety and depression have skyrocketed in the last 20 years. And so this study wanted to address that from the direction of looking at youth.”
Raine added that there is prior research looking at the link between fitness and cognitive health, including some published by her and Hillman, but this is one of the first studies in children this young.
“We’re some of the first to look at this younger group, but these findings are not inconsistent with work that’s been done in adolescents and older adults,” she said. “I anticipated there being some relation to our physical measures and our brain measures because we’ve seen that in the past. But again, because these are younger kids and all kids who are typically developing, it was a little surprising. The benefits of fitness are encouraging, but the negative effects that we’re already seeing with increased adipose tissue are cause for concern.”
Raine said there are a few reasons why these two factors may be linked. Increased adipose tissue can cause more inflammation, which could be causing these negative mental health symptoms. Conversely, exercise and physical fitness has a number of biological benefits that could impact one’s mental health.
However, the researchers pointed out that while the study found a correlation between body fat and mental health, this does not mean there is causation between them. This provides steps for further research on intervention methods moving forward.
“Now that we’ve identified in a large sample of children that body composition, particularly fat and lean mass, are related to reports of anxiety and depression, we can start to think about how best to intervene. This was a secondary analysis and so now it’s time to go chase down grants and design interventions so we can investigate a causal link between these factors and move beyond simply correlation.”
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