A longitudinal study of people who participated in Vasloppet, the world’s largest long-distance ski race, held in Sweden, showed that race participants have a lower incidence of bipolar disorder compared with the general population.
However, when running performance was considered, high-performance women had a higher risk of bipolar disorder than women who skied more slowly. This association was not found in men. The study was published in the International Journal of Bipolar Disorders.
Bipolar disorder is a complicated diagnosis. Its key feature is mood swings ranging from severe depression to hyperactive manic episodes. It is estimated that around 2-4% of the population suffers from it.
The disorder typically begins with one or more depressive episodes, but these are then followed by at least one manic or hypomanic episode. Mania is a condition in which a person displays an exaggerated level of activity or energy, mood, or behavior. It is characterized by feelings of invincibility, lack of sleep, racing thoughts and ideas, fast talking, and having false beliefs or perceptions.
Recent studies have linked bipolar disorder with a life expectancy of about 10 years shorter for both men and women. This has been attributed to poor cardiovascular health and an increased risk of suicide for people with bipolar depression. Because bipolar disorder affects how energetic a person feels, many researchers have wondered if exercise might have anything to do with the likelihood of developing bipolar disorder.
A large study in Sweden found that people with the lowest levels of physical fitness had a higher risk of bipolar disorder. But are there associations with an active lifestyle in general?
“Previous studies suggested that the preventive potential of physical activity for mental health could be substantial,” said study author Martina Svensson, an assistant researcher in the Tomas Deierborg Experimental Neuroinflammation Laboratory at Lund University. “We were both interested in investigating this on a broader level.”
“Since we previously showed that having a physically active lifestyle is associated with a 50% lower risk of developing depression and a 60% lower risk of developing anxiety disorders, we thought it would be interesting to investigate whether physical activity could also have a preventive effect. . potential when it comes to more complex psychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorder.”
“Our research team started a new project to investigate how physical activity affects brain disorders when I started my PhD project in 2013,” Svensson explained. “With my background in molecular biomedicine, the thesis project initially focused on investigating the molecular mechanism behind the potential beneficial effects of physical activity in animal models of cerebral ischemia and Alzheimer’s disease.”
“Because Deierborg had taken part in the Vasaloppet ski race twice before, he contacted Ulf Hållmarker (at the time, the head doctor for the Vasaloppet ski race) and Stefan James, who initially set up the entire Vasaloppet’s registry to obtain data on this and compare it with the general less physically active Swedish population. With this collaboration, we add an epidemiological perspective to our experimental exercise approach.”
Svensson and his colleagues analyzed data from people who participated in the Vasloppet ski race in Sweden between 1989 and 2010, a total of 197,685 people. They were matched against a group of equally sized non-skiers matched for age, region of residence, and age, bringing the total number of people included in the study to 395,369.
Participants in this race are known to smoke less, have more physical activity in leisure time, have a healthier diet, and have lower mortality than the general population. To try to match this, the researchers excluded from the comparison group people in poor health, those who couldn’t run the race even if they wanted to, and also people with various serious health conditions. They monitored the skiers’ finish time, that is, how long it took them to finish the race. Data on psychiatric and other health conditions of the people included in the study were taken from the Swedish National Patient Register.
The results showed that there were more than twice as many people with bipolar disorder in the non-skier group than in the skier group. “Both the men and women who participated in the ski race had a lower incidence of bipolar disorder. The results remained significant even if all people who developed a psychiatric disorder within 5 years of inclusion were excluded,” the researchers report.
“Those who had a physically active lifestyle (skiing in our study) had about a 50% lower risk of developing bipolar disorder compared with the general population during follow-up of up to 21 years in our study,” Svensson said. to PsyPost.
The researchers also examined whether the risk of bipolar disorder was associated with the time it took the skiers to finish the race, that is, how fast they skied. The results showed that the speed of skiing in the race had no impact on the risk of bipolar disorder in men. By contrast, the women who were the fastest to finish the race were more than twice as likely to have bipolar disorder as the women who skied the slowest.
“What surprised us the most was finding how physical performance in the ski race (time to finish the race among skiers) differently impacted the risk of future bipolar disorder in physically active men and women,” explained Svensson. to PsyPost. “In men, the finish time of the race did not have a significant impact on the risk of bipolar disorder.”
“We were surprised to see that high-performance women had nearly twice the risk of developing bipolar disorder compared to low-performance women. In men, the time to finish the race did not have a significant impact on the risk of bipolar disorder. Therefore, it appears that both sexes benefit from physical activity, although the optimal level may differ between men and women.”
But the study, like all research, includes some limitations. For example, it failed to match the two groups on all factors: the skier group smoked less and had a better diet than the non-skier group. In addition, it did not include any measures of physical activity outside of ski race participation, and there was no way to control for the participants’ family composition or genetic factors.
“Our study does not control for diet and other lifestyle habits that may be related to an active lifestyle,” Svensson explained. “In addition, our study does not investigate why faster skiing is associated with a higher risk of developing bipolar disorder compared with slower skiers among women. Therefore, future studies that consider the impact of exercise intensity on the risk of developing bipolar disorders in men and women separately are warranted, especially with designs that allow conclusions to be drawn about the directionality and causation of the association between exercise physics and bipolar disorder.
“It is likely that exercise behaviors and the onset of bipolar disorder are affected by genetics, psychological factors, and personality traits, confounding factors that could not be investigated in our cohort. Also keep in mind that our study is an epidemiological study, where you can find interesting associations, but you can’t really scientifically prove causation.”
Despite the limitations, the study provides important information about the link between physical activity and bipolar disorder.
“Our study is important because it is the largest population-based study to date, confirming a long-term association of a physically active lifestyle with the later development of bipolar disorders in both men and women observed in previous studies with lead times. shorter follow up. Svensson said. “In addition, our study reveals an association between physical performance and the risk of bipolar disorder in women specifically (to our knowledge) has not been reported before.”
“We are currently working to establish an updated version of our cohort, including an even larger study population with follow-up times of up to 36 years after participating in the ski race,” added the researcher. “In the new cohort, we plan to include other types of physical activities as well, such as cycling and running, as well as additional data on socioeconomics, fitness level, and cognitive ability. We hope to follow up on the findings we made in the previous cohort, taking new factors into account.”
The article, “A physically active lifestyle is associated with a lower long-term incidence of bipolar disorder in a large-scale population-based study,” was written by Martina Svensson, Sophie Erhardt, Ulf Hållmarker, Stefan James, and Tomas Deierborg.
Source: news.google.com