Background Little is known about the effectiveness of strategies to enable people to achieve and maintain recommended levels of physical activity. strategy below was used to search MEDLINE, with the addition of an RCT filter (Dickersin 1995). This strategy was altered for other databases, using an appropriate RCT filter for EMBASE (Lefebvre 1996). (observe Table 1; Table 2;Table 3;Table 4;Table 5; Table 6). Table 1 Search Strategy for EMBASE Table 2 Search Strategy for CINAHL Table 3 Search Startegy for PsycLIT Table 4 Search Startegy SPORTSDISCUS Table 5 Search Strategy SIGLE Table 6 Search Strategy SCISEARCH 1 exp Exertion/ 2 Physical fitness/ 3 exp Physical education and training/ 4 exp Sports/ 5 exp Dancing/ 6 exp Exercise therapy/ 7 (physical$ adj5 (fit$ or train$ or activ$ or endur$)).tw. 8 (exercis$ adj5 (train$ or physical$ or activ$)).tw. 9 sport$.tw. 10 walk$.tw. 11 bicycle$.tw. 12 (exercise$ adj aerobic$).tw. 13 ((way of life or life-style) adj5 activ$).tw. 14 ((way of life or life-style) adj5 physical$).tw. 15 162760-96-5 manufacture or/1-14 16 Health education/ 17 Patient education/ 18 Main prevention/ 19 Health promotion/ 20 Behaviour therapy 21 Cognitive therapy 22 Main health care 23 Place of work/ 24 promot$.tw. 25 educat$.tw. 26 program$.tw. 27 or/16-26 28 15 and 27 Data collection and analysis All abstracts were reviewed independently by two investigators who applied the following criteria to determine if the full paper was needed for further investigation: a) did the study aim to examine the effectiveness of a physical activity promotion strategy to increase physical activity behaviour? b) did the study have a control group (e.g. a no intervention control, attention control and/or minimal intervention control group)? c) did the study allocate participants into intervention or control groups by a method of randomisation? d) did the study include adults of 16 years or older? e) did the study recruit adults not living in institutions and free of chronic disease? f) was the studys main outcome physical activity or physical fitness? g) were the main end result(s) measured at least 6 months after the start of the intervention? h) BSPI did the study analyse the results by intention-to-treat or, failing that was there less than 20% loss to follow up? Two reviewers examined a hard copy of every paper that met the inclusion criteria on the basis of the abstract alone 162760-96-5 manufacture (or title and keywords if no abstract was available). When a final group of papers was recognized all papers were reviewed again by two reviewers independently. Any disagreement at this stage was 162760-96-5 manufacture discussed between the three reviewers and resolved by consensus. From the final set of studies that met the inclusion criteria, study details were extracted independently by two reviewers onto a standard form. Again any disagreements were discussed between three reviewers and resolved by consensus. Extracted data included date and location of study, study design variables, methodological quality, characteristics of participants (age, gender, ethnicity), intervention strategies, frequency and type of intervention and follow-up contacts, degree of physical activity supervision, study end result measure, effectiveness of intervention and adverse events. We published to and received clarification from 11 authors of the studies 162760-96-5 manufacture selected for the review. Our requests focused on data missing or 162760-96-5 manufacture unclear from your published papers and included data on study numbers at final analysis, means and standard deviations for intervention and control arms. For incomplete responses, we published again to authors asking for further data. We found different types of outcome results published in two included papers for the Sendai Silver Centre Trial (SSCT 2000). Tsuji 2000 reported.