Working Out Urban Stress
Understanding how exercise training protects against stress and prevents depression and anxiety in high-risk urban adolescents. Adolescents living in an urban, demanding and social- media-dominated environment commonly report high levels of stress.
Consequently, the incidence of stress-related psychopathologies, such as depression, is rising in this population. Furthermore, adolescents are nowadays often physically in-active and overweight, which further increases their sensitivity to stress. Exercise training helps to deal with stress. How it exactly does this, remains poorly understood.
The goal of this project is to understand how exercise training decreases sensitivity to stress and whether exercise training plays a central role in preventing depression and anxiety in high-risk adolescents, by studying it at the neurobiological and behavioral level.
Funding: Urban Mental Health
Researchers: Anneke Vuuregge, Anouk Schrantee