Systematic Review of the Functional Role of AMPK in mammalian tissues

METHODS In order to analyze current research on AMPK, a systematic literature review using the York University Library research guides was conducted using Web of Science from all years. Thursday, November 12 2015 a literary search was administered using the basic search terms: ‘AMPK*’ AND ‘energy’ AND ‘exercise’ while selecting topic from the drop-down menu. This initially rendered 349 publications from the web of science core collection. Using the refine results toolbar, unrelated topics were removed. This included: Orthopedics, Mathematics and the like. The refining process rendered a total of 137 search results from all databases. These publications were further refined to include Cardiovascular system cardiology and sport sciences, thus producing a total of (40) publications. The refined cardiovascular system cardiology and sport science publications were then exported into an excel sheet using the create citation report tool on web of science. Data was manually sorted according to relevance of keywords within the abstract including: (i) types of exercise subjects underwent (ii) affected bodily function, (iii) likelihood of damage reversal, (iv) publication date and number of studies. Abstract of all (40) articles were reviewed and assessed for relevance to topic. Excluded articles included those that made no mention of AMPK in the body, procedure in testing for AMPK levels and type of exercise. Of the (40) reviewed articles, (6) were removed with a total of (34) articles remaining. These were sorted manually upon reviewing the text in full, (34) of the remaining articles after thorough assessment produced a total number of (32) articles. (32) of the remaining articles spanned from 2001-2015 in publication date.