United States: Dancing can help people with Parkinson’s disease feel better and lift their spirits, according to a new study. The research showed that patients who took dance classes for months felt less depressed, and brain scans revealed positive changes in areas of the brain linked to mood.  

Senior researcher Joseph DeSouza from York University in Toronto said it was amazing to see how dance could affect the brain in such a positive way. 

“These improvements that we could see on MRI brain scans were also reported by the participants via survey,” DeSouza continued. 

In the small study, 23 people with Parkinson’s disease attended eight months of weekly dance classes through the Sharing Dance Parkinson’s program at The National Ballet School of Canada. 

As reported by the HealthDay, the classes went from merely learning leg and foot placements all the way to interpretive movements and waltz and other more complicated choreographed steps. 

Parkinson’s is a disease that really affects the motor system after the nerve cells that produce dopamine are damaged or die. Sign and symptoms may include muscle spasms, muscle rigidity, and slowing of movement. 

However, Parkinson’s also lead to depression or anxiety in some patients. 

In fact, between one-third and one-half of Parkinson’s patients will experience depression or anxiety sometime in the course of the illness, as stated in michaeljfox.org. 

“Patients with Parkinson’s have often a range of several symptoms and it is not only motor related deficits, but a lot of mental and social well-being deficits and one of them is depression” said lead researcher Karolina Bears, assistant professor of psychology at Algoma University Ontario Canada. 

This paper shows the observed depression rates markedly declined after every dance class gestured by the symbol (*). In addition, the effect compounded with itself that resulted in good mood enhancements in the eighth month. 

The study also revealed that as people went on dancing, signals originating in a part of the brain related to depression called subcallosal cingulate gyrus or SCG, reduced. 

This means that the SCG was not working as quickly as it would had you had depression, Bearss said. 

“These benefits have not been reported previously in relation to these two detection methods,” DeSouza also said. 

Dance is assumed to have a twofold advantage, opined the researchers. Music stimulates the reward system in the brain together with its sensory motor system.