Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 670

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 45 of the 45 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Debunking the Myth of Exercise-Induced Immune Suppression: Redefining the Impact of Exercise on Immunological Health Across the Lifespan

Open access
Campbell, John P., Turner, James E.·2018·Frontiers in Immunology
DOI 10.3389/fimmu.2018.00648
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Epidemiological evidence indicates that regular physical activity and/or frequent structured exercise reduces the incidence of many chronic diseases in older age, including communicable diseases such as viral and bacterial infections, as well as non-communicable diseases such as cancer and chronic inflammatory disorders. Despite the apparent health benefits achieved by leading an active lifestyle, which imply that regular physical activity and frequent exercise enhance immune competency and regulation, the effect of a single bout of exercise on immune function remains a controversial topic. Indeed, to this day, it is perceived by many that a vigorous bout of exercise can temporarily suppress immune function. In the first part of this review, we deconstruct the key pillars which lay the foundation to this theory-referred to as the "open window" hypothesis-and highlight that: (i) limited reliable evidence exists to support the claim that vigorous exercise heightens risk of opportunistic infections; (ii) purported changes to mucosal immunity, namely salivary IgA levels, after exercise do not signpost a period of immune suppression; and (iii) the dramatic reductions to lymphocyte numbers and function 1-2 h after exercise reflects a transient and time-dependent redistribution of immune cells to peripheral tissues, resulting in a heightened state of immune surveillance and immune regulation, as opposed to immune suppression. In the second part of this review, we provide evidence that frequent exercise enhances-rather than suppresses-immune competency, and highlight key findings from human vaccination studies which show heightened responses to bacterial and viral antigens following bouts of exercise. Finally, in the third part of this review, we highlight that regular physical activity and frequent exercise might limit or delay aging of the immune system, providing further evidence that exercise is beneficial for immunological health. In summary, the over-arching aim of this review is to rebalance opinion over the perceived relationships between exercise and immune function. We emphasize that it is a misconception to label any form of acute exercise as immunosuppressive, and, instead, exercise most likely improves immune competency across the lifespan.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.3389/fimmu.2018.00648

Cites

45 of 45 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 45 references

Cited by

Metadata

Authors
Campbell, J. P., & Turner, J. E.
Venue
Frontiers in Immunology
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
Published
2018-04-16
Volume
9
Pages
648-648
ISSN
1664-3224 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.3389/fimmu.2018.00648
OpenAlex
W2796931792
Cited by
670
References
45
FWCI
53.50
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.