Tai chi beats back depression in the elderly

This was on the univ. of California website. It is not a complete copy of the article. but what I have here is interesting.
Researchers at UCLA turned to a gentle, Westernized version of tai chi chih, a 2,000-year-old Chinese martial art. When they combined a weekly tai chi exercise class with a standard depression treatment for a group of depressed elderly adults, they found greater improvement in the level of depression — along with improved quality of life, better memory and cognition, and more overall energy — than among a different group in which the standard treatment was paired with a weekly health education class.
The results of the study appear in the current online edition of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
"This is the first study to demonstrate the benefits of tai chi in the management of late-life depression, and we were encouraged by the results," said first author Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a UCLA professor-in-residence of psychiatry. "We know that nearly two-thirds of elderly patients who seek treatment for their depression fail to achieve relief with a prescribed medication."
In the study, 112 adults age 60 or older with major depression were treated with the drug escitalopram, a standard antidepressant, for approximately four weeks. From among those participants, 73 who showed only partial improvement continued to receive the medication daily but were also randomly assigned to 10 weeks of either a tai chi class for two hours per week or a health education class for two hours per week.
All the participants were evaluated for their levels of depression, anxiety, resilience, health-related quality of life, cognition and immune system inflammation at the beginning of the study and again four months later.

An interesting Yoga blog

This person is knowledgeable on body mechanics. Worth a look.
http://www.dailybandha.com/

Meditation versus dance for harmonizing mind and body

This is a rather interesting article. It says that meditators are better tuned to their bodies than dancers. Read the article to see how they established this.
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/02/23/meditation-dance/

Celebration classes kick off March 7 and 8 CORRECTION

The new classes in Celebration start Monday and based on registration so far we're off to a great start!  The Tuesday 9:30 class is at Community Center at 851 and the Monday class is a Platinum Dance Academy on the other end of town in the Water Tower Plaza.
   If you missed the introductory sessions you can still enroll although class size will be limited. E-mail me at lee@leewedlake.com to do so.