Why singing, dancing and art are good for your health

Engaging in the arts is not just a pleasant pastime; it also seems to keep us healthier—and now we may know why. In the largest study of its kind, researchers have shown that engaging in creative activities is associated with beneficial changes in proteins involved in reducing inflammation and maintaining a healthy brain.

“We discovered a whole host of new biological pathways that help explain the relationship between art and health outcomes,” he says Daisy Fancourt at University College London.

Over the past decade, evidence has been accumulating that participation in music, theater or other visual arts can have powerful health benefits. Dance programs, e.g. helping people with Parkinson’s to walkwhile children who engage in art have a lower risk of depression.

Previous research also suggests that people who are those more involved in the arts tend to have lower levels of inflammationwhich is associated with better physical and mental health. But most of these studies examined only a handful of blood markers, limiting their use. Now, technological advances have made it possible to measure hundreds of proteins and integrate these data into large population studies. This approach, known as proteomics, creates a detailed picture of how our behavior affects our biology.

Using this method, Fancourt and her colleagues analyzed data from around 6,000 UK adults based on a one-time blood sample and examined how involvement in the arts was linked to 184 proteins associated with multiple systems in the body and brain.

The team created a measure of how engaged each person was in the arts by combining the frequency of their engagement with the variety of their activities and found that the more a person engaged in the arts – such as dancing, singing, reading, photography, creating and going to the opera – the more likely they were to have a specific increase or decrease in 18 proteins.

Using follow-up data, the researchers also showed that those who were more involved in the arts had a lower risk of several diseases in the future, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, depression and dementia. Crucially, they showed that protein changes explained 16 to 38 percent of the association between arts involvement and better health outcomes, even after accounting for confounding factors such as income and education.

Some of the affected proteins are involved in metabolism, others keep brain cells healthy. Some have also been linked to pathways that increase anti-inflammatory processes and reduce levels of inflammatory proteins. “So it’s possible that art stimulates rebalancing of the inflammatory system,” says Fancourt.

“Although participation in artistic activities has long been assumed to benefit health and well-being, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear,” he says. Daryl O’Connor at the University of Leeds in Great Britain. Although the results will require replication in other populations, he says the study is exciting and highlights new opportunities to study how our behavior affects our health.

Carmine Pariante at Kings College London say the findings are consistent with the protective effects of arts and culture on mental and physical health. But he points out that the study only presents a biological snapshot at one point in time, so it’s unclear how much art exposure we need to produce this protective effect.

One potential next step, Fancourt says, is to conduct causal studies, such as monitoring specific proteins before and after people engage in art.

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