Old age depression has been one of the widely studied topics in public health.
Researchers have examined the association between potential determinants and
depression among the elderly, and have demonstrated that exercise is an effective
treatment for mental illness. Although little attention had been paid to examine the
intensity of exercise on mental health, the findings are still inconclusive. In addition,
few studies are conducted specifically on the elderly population. In this study, we
provide new evidence on the effects of exercise intensities on mental health by using a
longitudinal survey of Taiwanese elderly. A more sophisticated econometric model is
then applied to control for potential unobserved heterogeneity. We also take the issues
of limited dependent variables into account, and use panel version of nonlinear models.
The estimation results indicate that exercise behavior, family characteristics,
socioeconomic status, health status, lifestyle and social support play important roles on
elderly mental health and depression. Most importantly, our estimation results suggest
that exercise be good for mental health of the elderly, but significant difference does
exist in different degree of intensities. In contrast to traditional inverted-U hypothesis
which assumes that moderate intensity exercise is the optimal pattern for positive
affective change, our results indicate that light intensity exercise is much better than
moderate intensity exercise for elderly mental health. In addition, our results also
38
suggest that light intensity exercise decreases the likelihood of depression, while
moderate intensity exercise doesn’t. Some policy implications can be inferred from our
findings for Taiwan’s public health policy. In order to promote mental health and reduce
symptoms of depression among the elderly, it is important to encourage them to exercise
regularly. Furthermore, our results suggest that interventions on psychological outcomes
should focus on exercise intensity. For Taiwanese elderly, light intensity exercise (i.e. no
change in breathing after exercise) is better to enhance elderly mental health.
Although we have investigated the relationship between exercise intensity and
mental health among the elderly, several limitations are revealed. First, because our
exercise intensity measurement is constrained by the data, it may be difficult to
distinguish the effects of exercise intensity on mental health in this study from previous
literatures that used a variety of intensity measurements. Second, both non-response in
sequent survey waves and missing values on key variables contribute to sample attrition
in our panel data, which reduces the sample size and thus reduces precision of estimates.
Third, some interviews were conducted with proxies who were not asked for any of
subjective questions (e.g. self-report health). This may lead to potential sample selection
bias, because it is reasonable to believe those individuals are more likely to be in poor
health and depressed.
39
Our results can be more robust by comparing the estimation results by means of a
more advanced econometric method, which can question or correct the sample
restrictions. Furthermore, in addition to exercise intensity, the frequency and duration of
exercise can be jointly considered to provide a more precise public health
recommendation. These are left for further work.
40
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