Depressive symptoms and sport activity among college students

Background and aims:To assess the prevalence of depressive symptoms among college students and to find out whether sport activity have any influence on decreasing the depression score.Methods:The authors screened all 664 first year college students. There were 466 females and 178 males. They answered The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and questionnaire about their sport activity (non active, recreational and active in sports). For the purpose of the analysis depressive symptoms were defined as a score > 11. We used Chi-square and Mann-Whitney test.Results:9,2% of the students have shown significant depressive symptoms. Statistically significant lower score on BDI have had the students who are active in sports compared with the recreational group and in correlation to the group of students not active in sports. In the group of the active ones in sports there are only 5,5% of them with depressive symptoms, while in the group of non active in sports there are 18% of them depressive. In separate analysis we have not found correlation of decreasing depressive symptoms and sport activity among males, but we have found that sport activity has a significant effect among females. Females are statistically more depressed (10, 5%) than males (5%).Conclusion:Our results have shown moderate values of depression symptoms among college population. More females than males have experienced depressive symptoms. While sport activity have not shown significant influence on the depression among males, it has shown significant influence in reducing the depressive symptoms among females.