New Delhi: Taking more daily steps at ages 11 and 12 was linked to fewer mental health problems a year later during early teenage, research has shown.
The findings, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open, also showed that the link between daily step count and mental health continued up to 12,000 or more steps a day, with no sign of the benefit levelling off in the data.
Researchers further found that teenagers with the highest step counts also showed differences in brain areas linked to movement and mood. These differences explained the link between step counts and mental health.
Amanda Paluch, associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US, said adolescence is a key period for brain development and mental health, and therefore, it’s encouraging to see that physical activity benefits extend to both.
“It is not an all-or-nothing situation. Adolescents don’t need to be elite athletes to benefit. 1,000 to 2,000 higher daily step increments, from any starting point, was associated with better brain structure and mental health outcomes, and that (a) beneficial association keeps building from there,” Paluch said.
Paluch urged finding “realistic, sustainable” ways to move more, through everyday opportunities such as walking to school, active play, and activities that one actually enjoys, so that benefits can be accessed wherever an adolescent is starting from.
The study tracked 5,515 adolescents taking part in the US Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. The participants wore Fitbit devices for three weeks around age 11 to 12.
A year later, the researchers checked in on their mental health through questionnaires completed by the young people and their parents measuring symptoms such as anxiety, low mood and behavioural problems. The responses were compared against the steps each teenager had been taking.
“In this cohort study, higher daily step counts were associated with structural differences in the brains of adolescents, which were in turn associated with better mental outcomes prospectively,” the authors wrote.
“Beneficial associations for mental health appeared to accrue continuously across the observed range, with no evidence of a threshold or plateau, highlighting that every step counts and the potential value of promoting daily steps in adolescents,” they said.
Teenagers who took under 5,000 steps a day had the most symptoms, those averaging around 8,000 had fewer, while those hitting 12,000 or more had the fewest of all.
The teens with the highest step counts also showed a slightly thicker brain tissue in two areas involved in movement and in regulating emotion, and the difference helped explain part of the link to better mental health, the researchers said.
Senior author Divyangana Rakesh, senior lecturer in neuroscience and psychology at King’s College London, said, “This study gives us some of the clearest evidence yet that even an everyday, low-cost, accessible measures of physical activity like daily step count is tied to how adolescent brains and mental health develop.”
“What’s striking is that we don’t see this benefit levelling off in the observed range, even among the most active young people in our sample,” Rakesh said.
