Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
60 papers
This 2001 review looked at studies on exercise, anxiety, depression, and stress. It found that short-term emotional effects of exercise are mixed, but many cross-sectional and longitudinal studies report that regular aerobic exercise training reduces anxiety and depression symptoms and may protect against the harmful effects of stress. The clearest…
This study followed 1,604 U.S. adults older than 60 for six years. It found that people who said they felt lonely (43% of the group) were more likely to have worse day-to-day function and were more likely to die. After the researchers adjusted for age, wealth, living situation, depression, and…
This 12-week randomised trial tested a structured dietary program (a modified Mediterranean-style diet) against a social-support control in adults with moderate to severe major depression. Sixty-seven people were randomised (33 to diet, 34 to control). The diet group showed larger drops in depressive symptoms on the MADRS scale at 12…
This umbrella review pooled evidence from 97 systematic reviews (1,039 randomized trials, 128,119 participants) to examine whether physical activity affects symptoms of depression, anxiety and psychological distress in adults. Overall, physical activity produced medium-sized reductions in symptoms (median effect size for depression = -0.43, for anxiety = -0.42; distress effect…
This CDC analysis used the 2019–2021 National Health Interview Survey to estimate how common chronic pain is among U.S. adults. In 2021, about 20.9% of adults (51.6 million people) reported pain on most days or every day for the past three months. About 6.9% (17.1 million people) had high-impact chronic…
This review collected studies of tai chi up to May 31, 2013 and found that many trials reported benefits for mood and psychological well-being. The authors included 37 randomized controlled trials and 5 quasi-experimental studies from English and Chinese databases. A small pooled analysis of three randomized trials that measured…
Many children and teens do not get enough sleep. Studies link use of screens, especially in the bedroom or in the hour before bed, to later bedtimes and less total sleep. Experts have set sleep-hour ranges for each age. Research also links short or disrupted sleep to emotional, behavioral, and…
Researchers followed 100 outpatients (mean age 62) who kept having dizziness. They found that problems of the vestibular system (inner ear and balance) and psychiatric disorders were the most common causes. About half the patients had more than one factor making dizziness worse, and life‑threatening causes were rare.
This narrative review updates an earlier fatigue framework and proposes a clearer way to think about fatigue during tasks. It defines motor or cognitive task-induced state fatigue as a psychophysiological condition that can show up as a drop in performance and/or a stronger feeling of tiredness. The authors add cognitive…
This review combined results from 10 intervention studies to see if physical activity programs change cortisol (a stress hormone) and sleep in adults. The pooled results found lower cortisol after activity programs and some improvement in sleep quality. The authors say the evidence is moderate for cortisol and low for…
In a remote, randomized trial (NCT05304000), people did one of three five-minute daily breathing exercises or five minutes of mindfulness meditation each day for one month. The researchers measured mood, anxiety, and physiological arousal (breathing rate, heart rate, and heart rate variability). Breathwork—especially exhale-focused cyclic sighing—produced bigger mood gains and…
This study measured health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in Danish patients with ME/CFS using the EQ-5D-3L tool and found their scores were much lower than the general population and lower than 20 other conditions. The average (unadjusted) EQ-5D-3L score for the ME/CFS group was 0.47, while the population average was…
