Physical fitness and risk of mental disorders in children and adolescents

A.) you have to actually do the exercise, which means the people who don’t may simply not do so because their mental illness is worse or at least different than the ones who do.

2. If you’ve ever read the attempts to quantify various mental illnesses, they’re extremely unscientific and borderline laughable if you’ve ever known a few people who suffer from them. What we call “depression” affects so many people in so many ways that in the future, it’s likely it will become a category of diseases with many different individual names. One of my exes medicated her depression by working, one by calling off work, for example. One would have (and did) do lots of exercise, one did not, and there’d be no way to quantify either on any simple scale.

3.) It’s obviously neither double nor single blind. You can’t not know if you’re exercising, and the researcher can likely tell which are which to a decent degree just by looking at them.

All a meta analysis of a bunch of non-controlled studies really tells you is the prevailing pre-sentiment among the researchers of a topic. Which, really, isn’t nothing (they’re more likely to guess correctly than a random person) but it’s far from an actual controlled study.

And I still stand by that there’s no way you could realistically say this study indicates causation with any certainty. Though that never stops people in the social sciences I guess.

This is because sadly diet, fitness and weight loss are some of the topics this otherwise very lucid website literally loses its mind over. Another is natality.

> Why is it that nearly every paper linked on HN, someone is in the comments saying the research didn't go far enough?

Because they usually don't.

And for those who are actually curious, look up "reproducibility crisis" and "publish or perish" to learn more about issues in academia, and ask ChatGPT about why systemic skepticism of scientific research is critical to the process of science.

> In this case without even reading the paper? Nothing in your critique is relevant to the fact that the authors found physical fitness and mental health linked. Nothing in your critique is relevant to the fact that the authors found physical fitness and mental health linked.

Such irony, that you didn't read any part of the preview yourself. If you did, you'd see:

"This study highlights the potential protective role of cardiorespiratory fitness, muscular endurance, and muscular power in preventing the onset of mental disorders. It warrants further investigation of the effectiveness of physical fitness programs as a preventive measure for mental disorders among children and adolescents."

The viability of this correlation, given controls for confounders, changes the significance of the results dramatically. Perhaps you think the point of research is to publish pointless correlations and suggest wild ideas for journalists to turn into clickbait?

For those actually curious: the authors are proposing a causation, and given the absence of any counter, it's a biased conclusion that attempts to increase the significance of the findings for the sake of publishing, at the cost of coming uncomfortably close to declaring a causal relationship. Not a criticism of the authors necessarily, but of the poor incentives plaguing academia. For studies like this to be of higher quality, they become very expensive, so given the lack of discussion regarding confounders in the preview, one should have strong skepticism regarding the actual practical significance of the strength of the causal relationship. Though if the research is of low quality, then it really all was pointless and probably only serves to keep the authors employed. At that point, the paper is only an unsubstantiated suggestion to study something else, so why even bother with the rest of the paper. That being said, having been an athlete for most of my life, I'm a huge proponent of children being given access to sports.

> No, not everyone has equal access to sports. Yes mental health is complicated.

Do you talk to people in real life like this? That's quite upsetting.

[1] https://a.co/d/9jqlU9z