Serve’s up: Could the secret to living longer be as simple as playing tennis?
Well, a new observational study finds that people who play racket sports like tennis appear to live longer than their non-playing counterparts.
The research, published this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at 80,306 adults, age 52 on average. The data came from 11 national health surveys from 1994 to 2008 in England and Scotland, which asked participants about their physical activity over the last month. These activities ranged from gardening and walking to cycling; running/jogging; badminton/tennis/squash; and football/rugby. Every participant’s survival was monitored for an average of nine years.
Those who played racket sports had a 47 percent lower risk of dying from any cause than those who didn’t play. Swimmers had a 28 percent lower risk, and aerobics practitioners, a 27 percent lower risk.
When isolating death risk to just heart disease and stroke, players of racket sports had a 56 percent lower risk of dying, swimmers a 41 percent lower risk and aerobic athletes , a 36 percent lower risk.
The analysis didn’t find that cycling, running/jogging or football/rugby were linked to a significantly reduced risk of death due to cardiovascular disease.
That shouldn’t necessarily discourage people from running, however. “The likely reason for them not showing reduced mortality in the fully adjusted analysis was that the participants in these sports were younger than their controls and the participants in the other sports to begin with, and we would need another 5-10 years to follow them in order to find the actual mortality rate,” study co-author Dr. Pekka Oja told the New York Daily News.
All told, this study wasn’t designed to come to any definitive conclusions. Limiting factors included that the researchers couldn’t monitor changes in sports participation levels over time.
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Could Playing Tennis Serve Up a Longer Life? originally appeared on usnews.com
