If exercise is medicine, why don't we know the dose? An overview of systematic reviews assessing reporting quality of exercise interventions in health and disease

Abstract

Objective: To determine how well exercise interventions are reported in trials in health and disease.

Design: Overview of systematic reviews.

Data sources: PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, SPORTDiscus and PsycINFO from inception until June 2021.

Eligibility criteria: Reviews of any health condition were included if they primarily assessed quality of exercise intervention reporting using the Consensus on Exercise Reporting Template (CERT) or the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR). We assessed review quality using a modified version of A MeaSurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews.

Results: We identified 7804 studies and included 28 systematic reviews. The median (IQR) percentage of CERT and TIDieR items appropriately reported was 24% (19%) and 49% (33%), respectively. TIDieR items 1, Brief name (median=100%, IQR 4) and 2, Why (median=98%, IQR 6), as well as CERT item 4, Supervision and delivery (median=68%, IQR 89), were the best reported. For replication of exercise interventions, TIDieR item 8, When and how much, was moderately well reported (median=62%, IQR 68) although CERT item 8, Description of each exercise to enable replication (median=23%, IQR 44) and item 13, Detailed description of the exercise intervention (median=24%, IQR 66) were poorly reported. Quality of systematic reviews ranged from moderate to critically low quality.

Conclusion: Exercise interventions are poorly reported across a range of health conditions. If exercise is medicine, then how it is prescribed and delivered is unclear, potentially limiting its translation from research to practice.

Prospero registration number: CRD42021261285; Open Science Framework: osf.io/my3ec/.

Keywords: exercise; methods; research; sports medicine.