Media mention: O'Connor quoted in Medium
Research on the link between mental health and exercise, co-authored by Patrick O’Connor, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology, was highlighted in a Medium article.
The article highlights a recent study where O’Connor and colleagues evaluated different types of studies to analyze how contextual factors during exercise—the how, where, and why—affect individuals’ mental health.
“The average effects on mental health are small across all the randomized controlled studies of exercise, and that’s partly because most of the studies focused on people who were not depressed or anxious—you do get bigger effects in those studies,” O’Connor said. “We’re communicating to scientists that larger- and longer-term controlled studies are needed to make a compelling case whether exercise does, or does not, truly impact mental health.”