Meta-Analysis of Exercise Effects on Depression and Anxiety in University Students

A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of 15 studies involving 659 students, investigating the effects of cardiorespiratory and muscular strength exercise on mental health. The study, authored by Silje Halvorsen Sveaas, was published on figshare in 2026. It reports standardized mean differences for depression and anxiety outcomes based on a search of six academic databases.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking effect sizes for exercise interventions based on reported standardized mean differences (SMDs).
• Informing student health service protocols based on the conclusion suggesting exercise as a potential treatment modality.
• Conducting secondary analysis of systematic review findings based on the pooled data from 11 RCTs and 4 quasi-experimental trials.

Strengths

• Follows PRISMA guidelines and is registered with PROSPERO (CRD42023398623), indicating a structured methodology.
• Reports specific effect sizes with confidence intervals (e.g., SMD=-1.05 for depression).
• Includes a substantial sample from the literature, synthesizing results from 659 participants across 15 studies.
• Uses the GRADE approach to evaluate the certainty of the evidence, providing transparency.

Limitations

• The primary data file is a 28.6 KB DOCX document, which is a very small text summary rather than a raw dataset.
• Row count and column-level documentation for any underlying data are unknown.
• The description focuses on review methodology; the availability of the extracted numerical data for re-analysis is unclear.

Provenance

Source

figshare, author Silje Halvorsen Sveaas.

Collection Method

Systematic review and meta-analysis following PRISMA guidelines, with searches in Embase, Ovid MEDLINE, APA PsycInfo, CINAHL, SPORTDiscus, and Scopus.

Time Range

Literature search conducted up to 8 April 2025.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-29 06:13:32.