[ORRando] Does extreme exercise prolong life?

[Cecilanne]

And then you have those of us who are literally allergic to extreme exercise :-)

Cecil "wanna see me swell up like a toad?" Anne

Sent from my iPad

On Jun 9, 2011, at 12:52 PM, Michal Young <michal at cs.uoregon.edu> wrote:

>> ...  Tour de France
>> participants show they died at an average age of 81.5 years,
>> compared to 73.5 in the general populations of France, Italy
>> and Belgium
> 
> The reason it is bogus to infer causality from data like this is that 
> we cannot distinguish between two alternative explanations: 
>   (1)  Extreme exercise prolonged the life of the participants
>   (2) People who are healthy enough to live a long time are 
>         more likely to be successful in a profession that requires
>         extreme exercise. 
> 
> We actually can't even be sure the exercise didn't harm them. 
> It's conceivable that, if these particular people did not train so 
> hard, they could have lived even longer. 
> 
> My intuition, like yours, is that exercise probably prolongs life. 
> I certainly feel better since I started participating in endurance
> exercise.  But a statistical argument requires much more careful
> reasoning than this.  Experiment design, and sound use of data from 
> "natural experiments", is very challenging. 
> 
> --Michal
> 
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