Systematic Review Data

Doctors have began to harness physical exercise's ability to promote positive postsynaptically-mediated plasticity to treat a range of disorder from genetic disorders such as Huntington's disease to mood disorders such as Major Depression Disorder (MDD). For this reason the understanding the relationship between physical exercise and neuroplasticity is an important endeavour as it gives doctors a non-pharmaceutical treatment option for many diseases. Thus a systematic review was conducted on Web of Science from 2010 to 2015 using the following terms 'neuroplasticity', 'brain', 'change*', 'exercise'. Articles were the only document types extracted, reviews, clinical trials, case reports, and abstract were all excluded. In addition only articles from the top five research domain in terms of published works were extracted. These reasearch domains included 'Neuroscience and Neurology', 'Biochemistry and Molecular Biology', 'Physiology', 'Psychology' and 'Psychiatry'. This resulted in 200 studies being extracted that were then individually reviewed to assess their relevance (Appendix). From the 200 articles studies were include in the final review if: (1) the study tested specifically the relationship between physical exercise and brain change, (2) the study used a manipulative approach methodology (3) target population of the study group were humans (4) the study was in English. Articles were excluded from the final review if: (1) the study tested the relationship between brain change with other stimuli other stimuli such as music in combination with physical activity, and (2) the study combined different types of exercise and measured the outcome as combination of the effects of these exercises.The 62 articles that met the inclusion criteria was systematically analyzed to: (1) see the type of exercise that was used in study, (2) Whether the gray matter volume, neurotorphic factor, executive function, or white matter volume was mesured in study, (3) the state of teh experimental subjects used in study.