ReviewProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
The active grandparent hypothesis: Physical activity and the evolution of extended human healthspans and lifespans.
Review in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 71 citations in OpenAlex.
- National Heart Center/Saudi Heart Association 2025 Guidelines for Cardiovascular Diseases Prevention and Risk Assessment.Saudi medical journal · 2026Guideline
- Why Do Humans Exercise? A Neuro-Evolutionary Framework for Discretionary Physical Effort.Evolutionary anthropology · 2026Review
- Reading hominin life history in fossil bones and teeth: methods to test hypotheses regarding its evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Physical activity and cardiometabolic health across an extreme lifestyle gradient.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2026Article
- Association between frequency of meeting daily step thresholds and all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease in older women.British journal of sports medicine · 2025Article
- Effort minimization: A permanent, dynamic, and surmountable influence on physical activity.Journal of sport and health science · 2025Article
- Grandparenting and Physical Activity.Journal of aging and health · 2025Article
- Thick or Thin? Implications of Cartilage Architecture for Osteoarthritis Risk in Sedentary Lifestyles.Biomedicines · 2025Review
- Increasing the health span: unique role for exercise.Journal of applied physiology (Bethesda, Md. : 1985) · 2025Review
- Effects of Silibinin on Delaying Aging inAntioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Global consensus on optimal exercise recommendations for enhancing healthy longevity in older adults (ICFSR).The journal of nutrition, health & aging · 2025Review
- Metabolic scaling, energy allocation tradeoffs, and the evolution of humans' unique metabolism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Time junior middle school students invested to sports and their cognitive skill development: a time economics perspective.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Physical activity and the risk of developing 8 age-related diseases: epidemiological and Mendelian randomization studies.European review of aging and physical activity : official journal of the European Group for Research into Elderly and Physical Activity · 2024Article
- Review
- Self-reported mid- to late-life physical and recreational activities: Associations with late-life cognition.Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society : JINS · 2024Article
- Exerkines and cardiometabolic benefits of exercise: from bench to clinic.EMBO molecular medicine · 2024Review
- Reconsidering the developmental origins of adult disease paradigm: The 'metabolic coordination of childbirth' hypothesis.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Review
- Higher number of steps is related to lower endogenous progesterone but not estradiol levels in women.PloS one · 2024Article
- Education disrupts the intergenerational transmission of health disadvantage across three generations in China.PloS one · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The proximate mechanisms by which physical activity (PA) slows senescence and decreases morbidity and mortality have been extensively documented. However, we lack an ultimate, evolutionary explanation for why lifelong PA, particularly during middle and older age, promotes health. As the growing worldwide epidemic of physical inactivity accelerates the prevalence of noncommunicable diseases among aging populations, integrating evolutionary and biomedical perspectives can foster new insights into how and why lifelong PA helps preserve health and extend lifespans. Building on previous life-history research, we assess the evidence that humans were selected not just to live several decades after they cease reproducing but also to be moderately physically active during those postreproductive years. We next review the longstanding hypothesis that PA promotes health by allocating energy away from potentially harmful overinvestments in fat storage and reproductive tissues and propose the novel hypothesis that PA also stimulates energy allocation toward repair and maintenance processes. We hypothesize that selection in humans for lifelong PA, including during postreproductive years to provision offspring, promoted selection for both energy allocation pathways which synergistically slow senescence and reduce vulnerability to many forms of chronic diseases. As a result, extended human healthspans and lifespans are both a cause and an effect of habitual PA, helping explain why lack of lifelong PA in humans can increase disease risk and reduce longevity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.