Exercise recommendations: evidence map - 17 findings across 17 sources

Evidence Landscape

This evidence map surveys 17 independent exercise recommendations sources drawn from the Tier-2 corpus and classified as direct findings. They span several populations, comparators, and endpoints and are catalogued by source in the Findings Map rather than pooled into one estimate — cross-population aggregation is not claimed. Each row records its own population, comparator, endpoint, and effect, so the spread of the literature and any tensions between findings remain explicit.

Findings Map

Population	Comparator	Finding	Source
men and women	—	elicit large increases in strength (∼25%)	2024 doi:10.2337/dci23-0100
runners and sedentary group in Stanfor…	sedentary lifestyle	those who exercise had a significantly lower risk of dying (15%) than the sedentary group…	2021 doi:10.18632/aging.203051
adults with NAFLD	control	exercise without significant weight loss significantly reduced the intrahepatic lipid (IHL…	2021 doi:10.3390/nu13093135
patients undergoing abdominal cancer s…	standard care	multimodal prehabilitation improves pre-operative functional capacity as measured by 6 min…	2021 doi:10.3389/fsurg.2021.628848
adults following heart valve surgery	no exercise training	relative risk (RR) 0.83, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.26 to 2.68; 2 trials, 131 particip…	2021 doi:10.1002/14651858.cd010876.pub3
adults undergoing cardiac, lung, esoph…	usual care or sham training	preoperative exercise training was associated with a lower incidence of PPCs (23 studies,…	2020 doi:10.1513/annalsats.202002-183oc
cancer survivors	control	Exercise significantly reduced the risk of recurrence in cancer survivors (RR = 0.52, 95%…	2020 doi:10.1177/1534735420917462
healthy middle-aged and older adults	control	aerobic exercise significantly reduced inflammatory markers (C-reactive protein (CRP): SMD…	2019 doi:10.3389/fnagi.2019.00098
older adults aged 62 to 83 years with…	active control	Qigong exercise resulted in significantly improved physical ability compared with active c…	2019 doi:10.1142/s0192415x19500149
elderly patients with a high risk of s…	—	The PS + MSE group exhibited significant improvements in the whole-body LM (standard mean…	2019 doi:10.3390/nu11081713
patients undergoing cardiac rehabilita…	cardiac rehabilitation witho…	ET (HR = 0.75, 95% CrI = 0.60⁻0.92) components effective	2018 doi:10.3390/jcm7120514
patients with non-metastatic cancer (m…	usual care control	resistance training exercise increased lean body mass assessed from dual-energy X-ray abso…	2018 doi:10.1002/jcsm.12379
individuals without weight loss	hypocaloric diet	In the absence of weight loss, exercise is related to 6.1% decrease in VAT	2016 doi:10.1111/obr.12406
patients with stroke	anticoagulants	exercise v anticoagulants 0.09, 95% credible intervals 0.01 to 0.70	2015 doi:10.1136/bjsports-2015-f5577rep
Drosophila melanogaster flies	selective breeding for longe…	Microarrays indicate that 65% of gene expression changes found in flies selectively bred f…	2015 doi:10.18632/aging.100789
prediabetic adults or individuals at r…	control groups	Diabetes incidence was only reported in two studies, with reductions of 58% and 56% versus…	2014 doi:10.1186/1479-5868-11-2
subjects (n = 44)	—	our subjects exhibited a marked range of hypertrophic responses (3% to +28%)	2013 doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1003389

Limitations

This is a scoping map of retrieved direct findings, not a meta-analysis: no pooled effect is computed, coverage is bounded by the Tier-2 corpus, and heterogeneity across rows precludes a single unified conclusion.

Scope

What is the range of reported effects across the exercise recommendations literature, and how do they vary by population, comparator, and endpoint? This map catalogues the findings rather than converging them to one claim.

Search Summary

17 direct (A_core) sources were retrieved from the Tier-2 semantic corpus for this topic and lane-classified; each is cited with a resolvable identifier in the source bundle below.

Tensions and Gaps

Findings differ in population, comparator, endpoint, and effect size, so they are not directly comparable and are not pooled. Gaps remain where a population or comparator is represented by only a single source.