Dance it out! Dance could ease depression symptoms in Parkinson’s patients, new study

Ever heard of dancing it out? Well, dancing has been shown to ease

depression symptoms

in people with Parkinson’s disease. Patients who took dance lessons had positive effects, especially in easing depression, according to a new study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
“It was very cool to see that dance had a positive effect on the mood circuits in the brain, which we could see in the imaging. These improvements that we could see on

MRI brain scans

were also reported by the participants via survey. Our study is the first to demonstrate these benefits across these two detection methods,” professor Joseph DeSouza, faculty of Health associate and an author of the study said in a release. The researchers at York University studied 23 people with Parkinson’s disease. These patients took part in the Sharing Dance Parkinson’s program at Canada’s National Ballet School. Other 11 healthy individuals took the dance cases, too.
The dance classes weren’t complex. They started off with simple leg and foot movements, then progressing to interpretive dances, waltzes, and more complex choreography, and took the classes for 8 months. The researchers measured the mood and depression scores in all participants using the Geriatric Depression Scale before and after every class and conducted regular MRI scans in York.
With each dance class, the depression rates dropped. The MRI scans showed reduced signals in a frontal-cortex brain region associated with emotional regulation and a significant decrease in depression scores.

“We essentially showed that SCG BOLD [blood oxygen level–dependent] signal decreases while dancing over time. This means that the SCG was not functioning as fast as it would if you had depression. People with

Parkinson’s disease

tend to have multiple symptoms that are not just motor related, there are a lot of symptoms that include mental and social well-being impairments, one of those being depression,” Karolina Bearss, one of the researchers said.

The new research adds on to Bearss and DeSouza’s three-year-long study, which found that dance helpes Parkinson’s patients with motor control, mood, and other functions of daily living.

“We’re not trying to cure Parkinson’s with dance. What we’re trying to do is to have people live a better quality of life. This goes for both those with the disease and their families that take care of them — they also get benefits of feeling better,” DeSouza, who is also with the Centre for Vision Research and Connected Minds at York said.