Dancing appears to lift the spirits of people with Parkinson’s disease.

Depression eased in Parkinson’s patients who took months of dance classes, a new study published recently in the Journal of Medical Internet Research shows.

Not only did their depression symptoms ease, but brain scans showed displayed changes in brain areas related to mood.

“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,” senior researcher Joseph DeSouza, an associate professor of neuroscience with York University in Toronto, Canada, said in a news release from the college. 

“These improvements that we could see on MRI brain scans were also reported by the participants via survey,” DeSouza added.

For the small study, 23 people with Parkinson’s disease took eight months of weekly dance classes offered by the Sharing Dance Parkinson’s program at Canada’s National Ballet School.

The classes progressed from simple leg and foot work up to interpretive movements, waltzes, and more complicated choreographed dances.

Parkinson’s is a movement disorder caused when brain cells that produce the neurochemical dopamine stop working or die. Symptoms include spasms, muscle stiffness, and slower body motion.

But Parkinson’s also causes some patients to develop depression or anxiety.

In fact, up to half of all Parkinson’s patients suffer from depression or anxiety at some point, according to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

“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,” lead researcher Karolina Bearss, an assistant professor of psychology at Algoma University in Ontario, Canada, said in a news release.

Results show that after each dance class, the patients’ reported depression rates dropped. What’s more, the effect stacked upon itself, leading to significant improvements in mood after eight months.

Brain scans showed that signals from the subcallosal cingulate gyrus (SCG), a brain region implicated in depression, decreased over time as people continued to dance, the study says.

This “means that the SCG was not functioning as fast as it would if you had depression,” Bearss said.

“Our study is the first to demonstrate these benefits across these two detection methods,” DeSouza added.

Dance is thought to have a double benefit, researchers said. Music activates the brain’s reward signals, while the movement engages its sensory and motor circuits.

However, DeSouza noted that dance won’t resolve a person’s Parkinson’s.

“We’re not trying to cure Parkinson’s with dance,” DeSouza said. “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.”

More information

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research has more on depression related to the disorder.

SOURCE: Journal of Medical Internet Research, study; York University, news release, Dec. 18, 2024

Source: HealthDay

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