Fancourt and Tymoszuk followed two thousand one hundred and forty-eight older adults in England who were free of depression at the start, and tracked them for ten years. Those who went to museums, theatre or cinema every few months had a 32 percent lower risk of . For those going monthly or more, the figure was 48 percent.
The relationship is graded rather than all-or-nothing. More frequent attendance went with lower risk, and the association held after adjusting for sociodemographic, health-related and social confounders. The authors also tested it against , against subclinical depressive symptoms and against different thresholds on the depression scale, and the result survived all three.
Researchers have long wanted to identify what protects older adults against depression, and a decade of work has looked at culture as a treatment for people already depressed. Prevention was the part nobody had studied. Fancourt and Tymoszuk asked whether in older adults is associated with a reduced risk of developing depression over the following decade.
The data came from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Two thousand one hundred and forty-eight adults who were free from depression at baseline were followed, and logistic regression models related the frequency of their cultural engagement to whether depression developed over ten years. The outcome combined the CES-D depression scale with physician-diagnosed depression.
What emerged was a dose–response relationship, independent of sociodemographic, health-related and social confounders. People attending every few months had a 32 percent lower risk of developing depression, with an of 0.68. People attending once a month or more had a 48 percent lower risk, at an odds ratio of 0.52. The authors conclude that cultural engagement appears to be an independent risk-reducing factor.
The checks are the reassuring part. Results were robust to sensitivity analyses exploring reverse causality, subclinical depressive symptoms and alternative thresholds on the depression scale. Two cautions remain. This is observational work, so the association is not proof of cause. And cultural engagement is a package of social contact, mental stimulation and mild activity, so what exactly protects people is a question the study leaves open.
wat. Going out to something once a month tracked a halving of later depression risk.
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Most of the research on culture and depression concerns treating people who are already depressed. This asks the prevention question instead, which is the one that matters for how a society spends public money.
How do we know?
Data came from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Logistic regression models related how often participants attended cultural events to whether they developed depression over the following ten years, using a standard depression scale combined with physician diagnosis.
What is still unknown
Observational, so it establishes association and not cause, however carefully the confounders are handled. Cultural engagement also bundles social interaction, cognitive stimulation and gentle physical activity together, and the study cannot say which of them is doing the work.
Learn something?
Where to next
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Does living abroad really make a person more creative?culture