Olympians Go for Gold, Get a Few Extra Years




In a retrospective study, Olympic medalists lived an average of 2.8 years longer than controls, David Studdert, ScD, MPH, of the University of Melbourne in Australia, and colleagues reported online in BMJ.

"The elite warrior Achilles in Greek mythology was forced to choose between a short glorious life and a long obscure one," they wrote. "There is no such trade-off for Olympic medalists."

But another report in the BMJ holiday issue -- known for its tongue-in-cheek selection of studies -- found no such advantage for athletes whose sports were more cardio-intensive, and there was actually a higher risk of death if they played contact sports.

Action Points

  • Olympic athletes appear to live longer than the general population, but only by a few years, a study has found.
  • Note that in another study of former Olympic athletes, engagement in sports with high-intensity exercise did not bring a survival benefit compared with sports involving low-intensity exercise.

Studdert and colleagues looked at the records of 15,174 Olympic athletes from nine countries who won medals in the Olympic games between 1896 and 2010. The data came from the OlyMADMen consortium of Olympic historians and statisticians who've been keeping track of Olympian data since the 1980s.

The researchers compared those data with matched cohorts in the general population.

Overall, more medalists than controls in the general population were alive 30 years after winning a medal (relative conditional survival 1.08, 95% CI 1.07 to 1.10), they found.

Medalists in eight of the nine countries in the database -- which made up the majority of worldwide medal winners -- had a significant survival advantage compared with controls, Studdert and colleagues wrote, and the advantage persisted regardless of whether the athletes won gold, silver, or bronze.

Also, medalists in endurance sports and mixed sports -- including running and soccer -- had a larger survival advantage over controls (RCS 1.13, 95% CI 1.09 to 1.17 and RCS 1.11, 95% CI 1.09 to 1.13) compared with medalists in power sports such as weightlifting and wrestling (RCS 1.05, 95% CI 1.01 to 1.08).

The advantages may be explained by genetic factors, physical activity levels, a healthy lifestyle, or "the wealth and status that come with international sporting glory," the researchers wrote.

They cautioned, however, that intense training and competition may only make up a minority of athletes' lives overall. Once they go into retirement, they may have higher rates of smoking, heart disease, depression and anxiety, as well as more musculoskeletal problems, as some studies have shown.

Indeed, a second study in BMJ found that high-intensity sports didn't offer a survival benefit compared with less intense sports.

Frouke Engelaer, a PhD candidate at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study of 9,889 athletes who participated in the Olympic games between 1896 and 1936. The data came from the Sports Reference database, an online database of Olympic athletes.

Their results showed that participating in sports of higher cardiovascular intensity weren't associated with any survival advantages, though they weren't associated with a higher risk of death, either.

"This would indicate that engaging in cycling and rowing had no added survival benefit compared with playing golf or cricket," they wrote.

But contact sports did increase the risk of death during the period studied. Those competing in games with a greater risk of collision had an 11% higher risk of death than those that don't typically involve colliding (95% CI 1.06 to 1.15, P<0.001).

There was also a 16% higher mortality risk with sports that had high levels of physical contact compared with those that had low levels (95% CI 1.11 to 1.22, P<0.001).

It's likely that the risk "reflects the effect of a gradual accumulation of multiple bodily injuries during sporting activities," rather than being a product of young athletes dying due to trauma, they wrote.

In an accompanying editorial, Adrian Bauman, MD, PhD, of Sydney University, and Steven Blair, PhD, of the University of South Carolina, noted it's long been the case that "mixed epidemiological evidence pervades this literature."

They noted, however, that there generally appears to be a slight advantage in longevity for athletes compared with the general population, but the upper threshold for benefit seems to be around 300 minutes of exercise a week.

"Although the evidence points to a small survival effect of being an Olympian," they concluded, "careful reflection suggests that similar health benefits and longevity could be achieved by all of us through regular physical activity."

Neither the researchers nor the editorialists reported any conflicts of interest.