Journal article
Longevity of outstanding sporting achievers: Mind versus muscle
A Tran-Duy, DC Smerdon, PM Clarke
Plos One | PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE | Published : 2018
Abstract
Background While there is strong evidence showing the survival advantage of elite athletes, much less is known about those engaged in mind sports such as chess. This study aimed to examine the overall as well as regional survival of International Chess Grandmasters (GMs) with a reference to the general population, and compare relative survival (RS) of GMs with that of Olympic medallists (OMs). Methods Information on 1,208 GMs and 15,157 OMs, respectively, from 28 countries were extracted from the publicly available data sources. The Kaplan-Meier method was used to estimate the survival rates of the GMs. A Cox proportional hazards model was used to adjust the survival for region, year at risk..
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Awarded by Center for Global Health
Funding Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research, Australian Research Council (CE170100005 awarded to Prof. Philip M Clarke). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.r We thank Bill Mallon for his compilation and provision of the OlyMADMen database, and Simon Walter for his provision of the R code which was adapted for the relative survival analysis in the present study. This research was financially supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (project number CE170100005). Our study was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of Melbourne School of Population and Global Health (MSPGH), the University of Melbourne (Ethics ID: 1851109.1).