If you want to live longer - play chess (or do one of these things)
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
Aren't most grand masters Russian?
Numbers don't lie but correlations can be spurious ( -> http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations :P)
Figures by Tyler Vigen CC4.0
Yes, but they were also compared against the other Russians
Mmmm, Mozzarella
I used to play chess like you, but then I took a Bishop to the King! :P
(if you don't find this funny, it is a reference to The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim)
But seriously, I find chess (and any other game, be it sports or tabletops or whatever) boring if you have no worthy opponent and in my "miserable" little life I have found no worthy opponents. Am I doomed to die young? :P
Anyway, great analysis, and at some point in the following days I should give the article you linked at the bottom a more serious read as my mind is going places these days and I can't concentrate to read more.
I used to play a lot with my grandpa. It's not the same since he passed away almost a decade ago. He had a very risky and unpredictable style.
I installed the chess.com . I lost the first game. Now I will train. Thanks for the advice 🙂
I'm on https://lichess.org/
There are some crazy variants line the atomic chess or the horde chess.
Both of them are incredibly addictive
Hehe! We use 95% confidence level for exclusions, not for claims for new phenomena were we ask for more ;)
Fun fact: some of the standard blood test parameters could easily go into the negative if only 1σ is subtracted. Many parameters in biology/medicine are just incredibly different among the individuals.
Or... Some of us have anti-iron in the bloodstream.
lol... But at least, here, they say it is a 95% CL interval. This is not always the case when we discuss claims :)
It's a shame on my part
I have not derived the interest in chess because I don't want to stress my Brain for game... And orientation about it is even holding me back and I like to watch people play it even on movies where experts play it
I pray I live long..... Am not lazy tho
Never mind, you will. Stay physically active, read, make jokes, whatever affects your brain and you will probably buy yourself a couple of years
I like balancing on one foot. If you can do it for 20 seconds or more blindfolded you are much less likely to get a stroke. :)
LOL I'll try...
Good, cos I don't play chess either!
Reading the post, I wonder whether you outright forget to write certain words sometimes! Like: "In other words, it looks like, but man this interval is wide". Is it because you hurry? dunno :D
I'm still thinking in Serbian, using lot of French on daily basis and my English is suffering when it comes to constructions :D
I play chess, although not as much as before.
Every game that makes you think can be considered as healthy. But you have to enjoy the game, otherwise playing it wouldn't make much sense.
There are numerous numbers of mental exercise one can indulge in apart from chess. However, chess seem to stand out, of all.
Thanks for this informative post.
You are absolutely right about the mental exercises. The only problem is to get some reliable data about the particular mental sport, so the chess was the most convinient.
i love the game of chess but dont know the rules of the game but with this information i will be more interested in it now .thanks