Cross-country skiers suffer less depression and dementia

Cross country skiing is a sport with many health benefits, apparently, is: you cut in half the risk for Depression, a possible Parkinson’s disease occurs later and also the risk of dementia is reduced. This shows a long-term study of almost 200,000 people who had participated in 1989 and in 2010 the famous Swedish Vasaloppet, a cross country skiing race over 90 km.

Researchers from the universities in Lund and Uppsala have compared the cross-country skier with the General population and found that your risk for

  • Depression two decades later, the half was reduced to: 1.030 athletes and 2.045 persons from the control group were ill.

    21 years after the participation in the race was diagnosed in 119 people, Parkinson’s disease, in the control group, there were 164 people. The difference between physically active people and the General population seemed to decrease over time.

    Vaskuläre dementia occurs less frequently

    The probability of the athlete to get sick later due to blood circulation disorders in the brain vascular dementia, was also 50 percent lower. Surprisingly, it wasn’t reduced your risk of Contracting Alzheimer’s disease, which is contrary to studies of other work groups, who had come to the conclusion that physical activity has an impact on Alzheimer’s.

    In a population study called "Malmö Diet and Cancer" the researchers came to similar results: The participants who were most physically active had a lower risk of vascular dementia, while no significant differences in the development of Alzheimer’s disease were observed between the groups with the highest and the lowest physical activity.

    ZOU

    Sources:

    DOI 10.1186/s13195-019-0538-4 DOI 10.3233/JPD-191762

    DOI 0.1016/j. psychres.2019.112546

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