The effect of exercise training on anxiety symptoms among patients: a systematic review

Anxiety often remains unrecognized or untreated among patients with a chronic illness. Exercise training may help improve anxiety symptoms among patients. We estimated the population effect size for exercise training effects on anxiety and determined whether selected variables of theoretical or practical importance moderate the effect.

Articles published from January 1995 to August 2007 were located using the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans Scientific Database, supplemented by additional searches through December 2008 of the following databases: Google Scholar, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Web of Science. Forty English-language articles in scholarly journals involving sedentary adults with a chronic illness were selected. They included both an anxiety outcome measured at baseline and after exercise training and random assignment to either an exercise intervention of 3 or more weeks or a comparison condition that lacked exercise. Two co-authors independently calculated the Hedges d effect sizes from studies of 2914 patients and extracted information regarding potential moderator variables. Random effects models were used to estimate sampling error and population variance for all analyses.

Compared with no treatment conditions, exercise training significantly reduced anxiety symptoms by a mean effect Delta of 0.29 (95% confidence interval, 0.23-0.36). Exercise training programs lasting no more than 12 weeks, using session durations of at least 30 minutes, and an anxiety report time frame greater than the past week resulted in the largest anxiety improvements.

Exercise training reduces anxiety symptoms among sedentary patients who have a chronic illness.