It very intuitively to establish the correlation between physical activity and longevity, but what about mental fitness?
Recently published study (10 days ago, it's still "steeming" hot) have compared life expectancy of International Chess Grandmasters, Olympic medalists and general population.
How the study was done?
Thanks to comprehensive databases, it was possible to find the data about 1200 FIDE Grand Masters and staggering 15000 Olympic Medalists.
We can clearly state that the sample size was good.
To examine the overall survival, Kaplan-Meier estimator was used. Up to date, the original paper about Kaplan-Meier nonparametric text was cited 54016 times. This is a very common method used in medical research, engineering, social sciences... In this case, it was used because some people on the list are still alive.
For the country/ regional statistics, Cox proportional hazards model was the survival method of choice (also very common method), I have no complains to make.
And the Results:
You can see that relative survival of is above the general population both for Chess Grand Masters and Olympic Medalists (the result is >1).
Shady areas denote 95% confidence interval (@lemouth and other physicists are cursing how sloppy we are).
We can also see that the effects are starting to be seen after 10+ years, and before that, it's pretty much similar to general population. It's also interesting to see that the "shady area" is much larger for the chess players. Maybe it's because the sample size was smaller.
But I don't like to play chess!
In that case, open this article, because it's not allowed to use it directly in the post.
This paper is meta-analysis paper, a review, with very large sample size from numerous studies (43000 athletes in this case). I <3 meta-analysis because the results are always fun, it's easy to read them and sometimes the findings are surprising.
The results:
- Standardized Mortality Ratio, SMR - the advantage for the athletes 0.67 (0.55-0.81), Conf. Int. 95% :)
- SMR for cardiovascular diseases related deaths only - 2 vs 0 for the athletes, 0.73 (0.65-0.82), Conf. Int. 95%
- SMR for cancer related diseases only 0.60 (0.38-0.94), Conf. Int. 95%
In other words, it looks like, but man this interval is wide
In Conclusion:
Keep in mind that this is correlation.
Anyway, if you are practising "mental fitness" - that could provide you a longer life.
Also, don't avoid to excersise regularly. Presented data are for pro athletes but you can see the trend.
Numbers don't lie.
References:
- Tran-Duy, A., Smerdon, D. C., & Clarke, P. M. (2018). Longevity of outstanding sporting achievers: Mind versus muscle. PloS one, 13(5), e0196938, link
- Garatachea, N., Santos-Lozano, A., Sanchis-Gomar, F., Fiuza-Luces, C., Pareja-Galeano, H., Emanuele, E., & Lucia, A. (2014, September). Elite athletes live longer than the general population: a meta-analysis. In Mayo Clinic Proceedings (Vol. 89, No. 9, pp. 1195-1200). Elsevier. link
Copyright Regulations for PlosOne:
Copyright: © 2018 Tran-Duy et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate”, Isaac Asimov
