Dancing vs Parkinson’s Depression

This is a fun study, and the results are/were very predictable, and/but not necessarily something that people might think of in advance. First, let’s look at how some things work:

Parkinson’s disease & depression

Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative neurological disease that, amongst other things, is characterized by low dopamine levels.

For the general signs and symptoms, see: Recognize The Early Symptoms Of Parkinson’s Disease

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of reward, is involved in our language faculties and the capacity to form plans (even simple plans such as “make a cup of coffee”) as well as being critical for motor functions.

See also: Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet ← for demystifying some of “what does what” for commonly-conflated chemicals

You can see, therefore, why Parkinson’s disease will often have depression as a comorbidity—there may be influencing social factors as well (many Parkinson’s disease sufferers are quite socially isolated, which certainly does not help), but a clear neurochemical factor that we can point to is “a person with low dopamine levels will feel joyless, bored, and unmotivated”.

Let movement be thy medicine

Parkinson’s disease medications, therefore, tend to involve increasing dopamine levels and/or the brain’s ability to use dopamine.

Antidepressant medications, however, are more commonly focused on serotonin, as serotonin is another neurotransmitter associated with happiness—it’s the one we get when we look at open green spaces with occasional trees and a blue sky ← we get it in other ways too, but for evolutionary reasons, it seems our brains still yearn the most for landscapes that look like the Serengeti, even if we have never even been there personally.

There are other kinds of antidepressants too, and (because depression can have different causes) what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. See: Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!

In the case of Parkinson’s disease, because the associated depression is mostly dopamine-related, those green spaces and blue skies and SSRIs won’t help much. But you know what does?

Dance!

A recent (published last month, at time of writing) study by Dr. Karolina Bearss et al. did an interventional study that found that dance classes significantly improved both subjective experience of depression, and objective brain markers of depression, across people with (68%) and without (32%) Parkinson’s disease.

The paper is quite short and it has diagrams, and discusses the longer-term effect as well as the per-session effect:

Impact of Weekly Community-Based Dance Training Over 8 Months on Depression and Blood Oxygen Level–Dependent Signals in the Subcallosal Cingulate Gyrus for People With Parkinson Disease: Observational Study

Dance is thought to have a double-effect, improving both cognitive factors and motor control factors, for obvious reasons, and all related to dopamine response (dancing is an activity we are hardwired to find rewarding*, plus it is exercise which also triggers various chemicals to be made, plus it is social, which also improves many mental health factors).

*You may have heard the expression that “dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire”, and while that may not be true for everyone on an individual level, on a species level it is a very reasonable hypothesis for why we do it and why it is the way it is.

Want to learn more?

We wrote previously about battling depression (of any kind) here:

The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need

Take care!