Researchers from the University of Castile-La Mancha have found that six to ten thousand daily steps can reduce the risk of depression. The results of the study are published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Scientists came to these conclusions as a result of a meta-analysis of 33 previously published studies, which involved more than 96 thousand people. The scientific papers used information about the level of physical activity of volunteers (collected using fitness trackers) and the state of their mental health.
It turned out that even a small increase in the level of physical activity - a thousand steps a day compared to the baseline of five thousand - reduced the likelihood of depression by 9%. This effect increased as the level of daily mobility increased. For example, people who walked seven thousand steps a day had a 31% reduced risk of depression compared to those who walked only five thousand.
Those who took more than seven and a half thousand steps a day were 43% less likely to be depressed. These results were similar across all age and gender groups.
However, according to the study, increasing activity to ten steps a day was not associated with a marked improvement in mental health, and the benefit of taking more steps than that was not statistically significant.
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