Tai Chi For Depression PDF Download

"Background: Older adults with bipolar disorder (BD) are expected to exceed over 50% of the BD population, and is associated with depression, persistent sub-syndromal depressive symptoms, and poor cognition. Current pharmacotherapies are limited in efficacy for depression, not effective in cognition, and often poorly-tolerated. Mind-body interventions have been found to be effective in treating several psychiatric conditions including BD. It is unknown whether qigong/Tai Chi, forms of moving mindfulness, will be efficacious in improving depression, cognition, and other mental health outcomes in any BD patient population. Methods: We conducted a 12-week online randomized controlled trial comparing qigong/Tai Chi vs. an active control light exercise in 23 patients with BD aged e"0 years. The primary outcome was change in depressive symptoms, with a secondary analysis examining patients with at least sub-syndromal baseline depressive symptom severity. The secondary outcome was verbal fluency and exploratory outcomes included mania, anxiety, quality of life, daily functioning, mindfulness, self-compassion, self-reported depression, and self-reported mania. Results: There were no significant differences between trial arms in study outcomes. However, for the subgroup of patients with subsyndromal or acute depressive symptoms at baseline, there was a clinically significant change in depressive symptoms at 12-weeks (qigong/Tai Chi vs. active control, 15.43 (±6.08) to 9.42 (±11.41) vs. 17.25 (±6.92) to 15.25 (±8.48), p=0.069). Conclusion: Qigong/Tai Chi may be efficacious in reducing depressive symptoms for middle to older age BD patients with at least subsyndromal or more severe depressive symptoms. More research is needed to further determine the efficacy of qigong/Tai Chi in the BD population"--