Does Exercise Help Someone Recover From an SUD?

Clinicians are always striving to find ways to improve the treatment of people who suffer from Substance Use Disorders (SUD). For some people one treatment will work better than another, which can be very frustrating to clinicians and patients who are striving to get better. Grete Flemmen, Runar Unhjem, and Eivind Wang decided to test the effects of high-intensity interval training in patients with substance use disorders.

The study tested 24 different patients over an 8-week period to see how a high-intensity interval training program would impact people with an SUD. They divided participants into two groups: a high intensity-training group or a conventional rehabilitation control group. Participants were also administered two self-questionnaires to test insomnia, anxiety, and depression in each participant before and after the 8 week period. The results found that there was not much of a difference when people with an SUD took part in a high-intensity interval training program. One significant difference was that people in the interval training group had a significant decrease in their level of depression, while those who were in the control group had a significant decrease in their anxiety level. Overall, this decrease in anxiety and depression could help patients avoid relapse due to the fact that past users might not be trying to “escape” or avoid feelings of depression or anxiety which had originally caused them to use.

There are also some major limitations to this study. First off, only 24 patients participated in the study. 24 people is not an accurate representation of people who struggle with an SUD. Second, this experiment was only done at one facility over the course of 8-weeks. This study did not take into account ethnicity, age, gender, SES, specific cultural values, etc., when conducting this study. Finally, it is very far fetched to think that a study this small, with such little cultural variety, could be applied to all people who struggle with an SUD.

Abstract

Flemmen, G., Unhjem, R., & Wang, E. (2014). High-intensity interval training in

patients with substance use disorder. BioMed Research International,

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/616935