A new study has revealed that dancing lowers the depression associated with Parkinson’s disease, and the benefits can be seen in multiple ways.
The study followed 23 participants in the Sharing Dance Parkinson’s programme at Canada’s National Ballet School who had a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, as well as 11 healthy controls, who were mostly family members or caretakers.
The participants took weekly dance classes for eight months, which progressed from simple leg and foot work and pliés to interpretive movements, waltzes, and more complicated, choreographed dances.
“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,” said Faculty of Health associate professor Joseph DeSouza, an author of the study.
“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.”
The researchers found that after each dance class, reported depression rates dropped, and the effect was cumulative from class to class, with significant improvements after eight months.
They also found that the MRI scans showed reduced signals in a frontal-cortex brain region associated with emotional regulation and that in a smaller subset of the participants, a significant decrease in depression scores was correlated with changes in the SCG node.
“We essentially showed that SCG BOLD [blood oxygen level–dependent] signal decreases while dancing over time. Which means that the SCG was not functioning as fast as it would if you had depression,” said Bearss.
Parkinson disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease. Before diagnosis, there is a prodromal phase that can last two to 10 years and is characterised by low mood, even before other symptoms appear, such as tremors and other issues with motor control.
“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,” said Bearss.
This research builds on a three-year-long study that found that dance training helps people with Parkinson disease with motor control, mood, and other functions of daily living.
Dance is thought to have a double benefit, with music activating the brain’s reward centres, and the movement acting on sensory and motor circuits. DeSouza, who has been dancing with participants in the programme for 14 years, says that while dancing is not a treatment for Parkinson disease per se, the benefits are clear.
“We’re not trying to cure Parkinson’s with dance,” says DeSouza, also with the Centre for Vision Research and Connected Minds at York.
“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.”
