Exercise, Tea, and Depression

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Exercise, Tea, and Depression

Posted 1/6/2010

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My mother was one of the last true Victorian ladies and held to the adage: "Horses sweat, men perspire, and women glow." She would never have set foot in a gym although she was an enthusiastic rider in her youth and walker into her 80s. As much as she disdained exercise, she valued the healing powers (physical and psychological) of tea. "Would you like some tea?" was often the closest she could come to a display of affection. The tea was always done properly, bringing the heated pot to the boiling water, and it usually had its promised effect.

With this history, I was especially delighted to see this study by researchers from Vanderbilt and Shanghai who studied the impact of exercise and tea on women who had been treated for breast cancer. Here is the conclusion and a link if you want to read more:

Exercise, Tea Consumption, and

Depression Among Breast Cancer

Survivors

Xiaoli Chen, Wei Lu, Ying Zheng, Kai Gu, Zhi Chen, Wei

Zheng, and Xiao Ou Shu*

From the Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center

and Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Vanderbilt University Medical

Center, Nashville, TN; and Shanghai Institute of Preventive

Medicine, Shanghai, China.

Overall, 26% of women reported depressive symptoms and 13% met the criteria of clinical depression at 18 months postdiagnosis. Women with a higher exercise level (ie, 8.3 MET h/wk) were less likely to have depression than nonexercisers; the multivariate adjusted odds ratios (ORs) were 0.71 (95% CI, 0.47 to 1.07) for mild depression and 0.56 (95% CI, 0.35 to 0.88) for clinical depression in analyses controlled for sociodemographic and clinical factors and baseline QOL. Women who increased their exercise level had lower risk for depression. Regular tea consumption (ie, > 100 g dried tea leaves/mo) was inversely associated with overall depression (OR, 0.39; 95% CI, 0.19 to 0.84). No associations were found for dietary intake or supplement use with depression.

Conclusion: Regular exercise participation and tea consumption may play an important role in the prevention of depression among breast cancer survivors.