Heena Sharma Blog

Here's another reason to add physical exercise to your daily routine. According to a recent study, exercising may help fight depression by stimulating muscle-generated mood boosters. According to research, the underlying mechanisms that make us feel good when we exercise, persist into old age and highlight the importance of staying active. "A previous study demonstrated these mechanisms in healthy young adults, however, it was unknown whether the muscle deterioration which accompanies aging would preclude older adults from achieving similar exercise-induced benefits. This could have important implications concerning the use of exercise as a treatment or a preventative strategy for depression in seniors," said David Allison, lead author on the study which was published in the American Journal of Physiology. Muscle loss is a common problem in the elderly, which may restrict that pathway, and therefore increases the risk of mental depression, says Allison. Fo...

Language people use in their Facebook posts can predict a future diagnosis of depression as accurately as the tools clinicians use in medical settings to screen for the disease, suggests new research. "Social media data contain markers akin to the genome," said one of the researchers Johannes Eichstaedt from University of Pennsylvania in the US. "With surprisingly similar methods to those used in genomics, we can comb social media data to find these markers. Depression appears to be something quite detectable in this way," Eichstaedt said. For the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers identified data from nearly 1,200 people consenting to share Facebook statuses and electronic medical-record information. They then analysed the statuses using Machine Learning techniques to distinguish those with a formal depression diagnosis. Analysing social media data shared by the particip...