Evidence map›Paper›PMID 22514538›Full record

ArticleFrontiers in physiology2012

Fatigue is a Brain-Derived Emotion that Regulates the Exercise Behavior to Ensure the Protection of Whole Body Homeostasis.

Timothy David Noakes

Open access · goldAbstract read
PubMed Full text at PMC Publisher
In one paragraph

Article in Frontiers in physiology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 180 papers, 8 of them syntheses that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
180citing papers in PubMed, 8 pooled it
16.9field-weighted citation impact, top 1% of its field
1 · What the graph read from 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.

2 · The registry

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.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

180 citing papers in PubMed, 8 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 464 citations in OpenAlex.

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  5. Correlation properties of heart rate variability during endurance exercise: A systematic review.Annals of noninvasive electrocardiology : the official journal of the International Society for Holter and Noninvasive Electrocardiology, Inc · 2020
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  15. Pacing strategies during repeated maximal voluntary contractions.European journal of applied physiology · 2014
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  18. Towards a domain-general mechanistic model of fatigue: application to Functional Neurological Disorder.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026
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120 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.

Timothy David NoakesUCT/MRC Research Unit for Exercise Science and Sports Medicine, Department of Human Biology, University of Cape Town Cape Town, South Africa.
University of Cape Town · ZA

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

An influential book written by A. Mosso in the late nineteenth century proposed that fatigue that "at first sight might appear an imperfection of our body, is on the contrary one of its most marvelous perfections. The fatigue increasing more rapidly than the amount of work done saves us from the injury which lesser sensibility would involve for the organism" so that "muscular fatigue also is at bottom an exhaustion of the nervous system." It has taken more than a century to confirm Mosso's idea that both the brain and the muscles alter their function during exercise and that fatigue is predominantly an emotion, part of a complex regulation, the goal of which is to protect the body from harm. Mosso's ideas were supplanted in the English literature by those of A. V. Hill who believed that fatigue was the result of biochemical changes in the exercising limb muscles - "peripheral fatigue" - to which the central nervous system makes no contribution. The past decade has witnessed the growing realization that this brainless model cannot explain exercise performance. This article traces the evolution of our modern understanding of how the CNS regulates exercise specifically to insure that each exercise bout terminates whilst homeostasis is retained in all bodily systems. The brain uses the symptoms of fatigue as key regulators to insure that the exercise is completed before harm develops. These sensations of fatigue are unique to each individual and are illusionary since their generation is largely independent of the real biological state of the athlete at the time they develop. The model predicts that attempts to understand fatigue and to explain superior human athletic performance purely on the basis of the body's known physiological and metabolic responses to exercise must fail since subconscious and conscious mental decisions made by winners and losers, in both training and competition, are the ultimate determinants of both fatigue and athletic performance.

Indexed as

anticipationbraincentral governor modelcentral nervous systemfatiguefeedbackfeedforwardskeletal muscle

Identifiers

PMID22514538
PMCPMC3323922
OpenAlexW2099000799

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY-NC
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

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 OpenQuestion graph.