{"publication_id":"29128105-c2a4-458c-82fa-0e4185e828f9","screening":{"identified":46,"screened":46,"excluded":0,"included":46,"included_or_retained":46,"flow":["identified","screened","excluded_with_reasons","included"],"wording":"46 candidate receipts retained after source retrieval, deduplication, and topic filtering. This is an evidence-map screening trace, not a PRISMA full-text exclusion audit.","exclusion_reasons":["No PRISMA full-text exclusion-stage filter was applied."]},"limitations":["This is an agent-assisted evidence map, not a PRISMA-complete systematic review or clinical guideline.","It is not PROSPERO-registered and should not be read as medical advice.","Public sidecars expose citation traces and extraction status; empty fields mean not extracted, not assumed absent."],"contradictions":["Tai chi is widely promoted as a low-impact mind-body exercise for older adults, yet its purported benefits span heterogeneous cardiometabolic, skeletal, cognitive, and psychological endpoints, and the strength of supporting human evidence varies sharply across these domains.","Three explicit within-corpus contradictions recur: Yin 2023 (negative direction on hypertensive outcomes) versus Li 2021 (positive direction on cerebrovascular indices); Hao 2019 versus Yang 2021 (mixed direction on knee-related strength); and Hu 2021 (positive on osteoarthritis pain) versus Kuang 2024, Lin 2024, and Lei 2022 (null on anxiety, falls, and motor function), each of which should temper any single-domain enthusiasm.","The corpus contains 11 direct clinical sources, 35 adjacent, review, or context sources, and no sources classified primarily as mechanistic or model-system evidence. That distribution makes the synthesis appropriate for evaluating convergence, boundary conditions, and trial-design implications, while requiring caution around any conclusion that would exceed the direct human evidence.","Null findings have a specific role in this evidence model. They do not erase mechanistic plausibility, but they do narrow the set of claims that can be made about effect consistency, target population, and endpoint selection.","The evidence base also distinguishes breadth from certainty. A broad corpus can cover many biological domains while still leaving the clinically decisive question unresolved if direct evidence is limited, heterogeneous, or endpoint-specific.","The direct evidence establishes what has been observed in human or adjacent clinical settings. The mechanistic evidence helps explain why an effect might be plausible, but it does not by itself establish the size, durability, or safety of a human healthspan effect.","The study-level structure also prevents selective emphasis. Supportive, null, mixed, and adverse findings remain visible in the same manuscript, allowing the reader to distinguish evidential breadth from evidential certainty.","Findings Map accounting note: each outcome-class n, direction count, directness count, and source roster is computed from the same source-level rows listed in the detailed table. Receipt-level direction is not a statement that the source abstracts lack directional statistics; it is the conservative coded polarity used for synthesis accounting. Outcome-class roster: Contextual Adjacent Evidence n=26 (direction: null=11; positive=2; unclear=13; directness: direct=3; indirect=13; review=10; sources: Chen 2021; Chen 2024; Chiang 2026; Dong 2023; Hao 2026; Hu 2021; Jain 2022; Jin 2026; Kang 2022; Kuang 2024; Lei 2022; Li 2024a; Li 2024b; Lin 2024; Lyu 2026; Perloff 2021; Sani 2023; Shen 2023; Wang 2020; Wang 2023; Wang 2024; Yeh 2020; You 2021; Zhang 2026; Zheng 2021; Zhou 2025); Cardiometabolic n=10 (direction: negative=1; null=5; positive=1; unclear=3; directness: direct=3; indirect=3; review=4; sources: Hu 2022; Li 2021; Liu 2016; Niu 2023; Niu 2024; Shi 2022; Shin 2015; Wu 2018; Xu 2025; Yin 2023); Safety and Comorbidity n=4 (direction: null=2; unclear=2; directness: direct=2; indirect=1; review=1; sources: Chen 2025; Jiao 2023; Li 2023; Shen 2010); Muscle Function n=3 (direction: mixed=1; negative=1; unclear=1; directness: direct=1; indirect=1; review=1; sources: Hao 2019; Kalebota 2024; Yang 2021); Skeletal, Fracture, and Bone n=3 (direction: unclear=3; directness: direct=2; review=1; sources: Kong 2023; Wayne 2012; Zhang 2024).","Tension-accounting note: disagreement counts are claim-level. Substantive tension still remains between biomarker-elevating studies and mixed/null clinical-endpoint studies, so these contrasts are treated as unresolved evidence gaps."]}