THE antidepressant effects of a workout may one day come in a pill.
Exercise alleviates depression, but no one knows exactly how. Now Ronald Duman at Yale University and his colleagues have found a gene in mice that may mediate the effect. The team created a chip to screen for genes in the hippocampus whose activity is affected by exercise. The hippocampus is a part of the brain that is very sensitive to hormones and stress.
They found that long workouts on the running wheel ramped up the activity of 33 genes. One of them, called VGF – which…
