Research Shows Walking Can Lift Depression (卫生类)
New research by German scientists shows that author Charles Dicknes was onto a good thing when he took long, brisk walks to relieve periodic bouts of depression. The author of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield would walk for hours in the 1860s as an antidote to intense feelings of sadness which alternated with restless euphoria.______(1)_____
Aerobic exercise like rapid walking can be more effective at lifting depression than drugs, reported the scientists led by Dr. Fernando Dimeo.______(2)_____The team found that in 10 of these patients drugs had failed to bring any substantial improvement. The team devised an exercise regime for the group that involved walking on a treadmill for 30 minutes every day. ______(3)_____ The intensity of the training programme was stepped up as the heart rate adapted. A measurement of depression severity was taken at the start and the end of the programme, and patients were asked to rate their own mood regularly over a 10-day period. The researchers in Berlin found that after 10 days of the course six patients felt “substantially less depressed”.
______(4)_____ Two were slightly less depressed, while four others remained unchanged. Depression levels overall fell by a third and on the self-assessed scores by 25 percent, said the researchers whose findings appeared in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
The study was small but the extent of the improvement was said by scientists to be impressive.______(5)_____
Nineteenth century doctors would have called Dickens’s condition melancholia since the psychological condition of depression was unknown. Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd says the author’s son Charles remembers his father’s “heavy moods of deep depression” and many times of “intense nervous irritability”, something modern psychologists would certainly recognize.
A. The number included five who had not found any relief using drug treatment.
B. Long and brisk walks are not necessarily beneficial to every person.
C. They studied 12 people with severe depression that had lasted an average of nine months.
D. The outcome indicated a clinical benefit which could not be obtained with pharmacological treatment currently available, they said.
E. This is also the advice that experts from the Free University in Berlin are giving today.
F. According to the regime, intense activity lasting three minutes was alternated with walking at half speed for three minutes.
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