Exercise is known to have an effect in preventing, treating, or ameliorating the effects of a variety of serious illnesses, including cancer, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and psychiatric and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.
[2][3][1] Known biological targets affected by exercise have also been targets of drug discovery, with limited results.
These known targets include:[2] The majority of the effect of exercise in reducing cardiovascular and all-cause mortality cannot be explained via improvements in quantifiable risk factors, such as blood cholesterol.
This further increases the challenge of developing an effective exercise mimetic.
[1] Moreover, even if a broad spectrum exercise mimetic were invented, it is not necessarily the case that its public health effects would be superior to interventions to increase exercise in the population.