Danish study shows most of you will die the same time as a couch potato

In trainers?

Isn't the mortality rate 100%?

Most such studies fail to control for diet.

Low-carb vegans who run derive many benefits. This is a multidimensional issue. Eating the western diet diminishes the benefits of running. Adequate studies focusing on both independent variables, running and diet, have not been conducted.

Yea, but I will have a faster 5k than the couch potato...

Garbage study. The sample size of fast runners was so small that you can't conclude anything meaningful from the death rate. Now, it IS possible to find a larger group of fast runners and follow them, but then you don't get these "interesting" results. I'm also curious as to why they used all cause mortality rather than studying what the people died from -- did they get hit by cars? Heart attack?

Take a coin, flip it ten times, and sometimes you'll flip 8 heads. Wow! You must be able to control your coin flips! Take 50 young jugglers, follow them a while, and one of them might die. Wow, juggling is horrible for you!

So the strenuous joggers may not have lived longer than the coach-potatoes, but what was their quality of life?

Cubism Cubed wrote:

I never understand why people bring up these studies to runners, I don't run to add years to my life - I run because it is what I like to do.

I definitely agree, but I'd go even further: On a similarly puzzled vein, I don't know why people try to cite these studies or even conduct these studies -- it's like they're trying to discredit physical exercise, which is just...f*cking...weird.

Sounds a lot like global warming and climate change.

Precious Roy wrote:

Citizen Runner wrote:

Sure you can, you just have larger uncertainty intervals as they show in their analysis.

To be fair, any such study has it's limitations, which is fine if they are documented. The problem is that most of this information is distributed through the popular press to an audience that has no appetite for nuance.

A responsible scientist would not publish findings with a huge uncertainty interval generated by comparing @100 subjects with @4900. This stuff gets into journals because it is interesting. Just imagine if a left wing environmental group had a study of 5000 people showing that a group of 100 diabetics out of the 5000 had higher mortality rates when eating GMOs. Everyone would cry foul if they concluded that GMOs were harmful to diabetics. That is precisely what is happening here.

I posted my thoughts after reading the full-text version of the article on my website:

http://www.runningwritings.com/2015/02/is-less-running-better-for-you-in-depth.html

The short version is this: The statistical analysis in this paper provide pretty good evidence that modest amounts of jogging (1-3x runs per week, 0-2.4 hours per week total, at a slow to average pace) will decrease your risk of death. However, the attention-grabbing stuff—that joggers who run too often, too far, and too fast are just as likely to die as sedentary people—is flawed because it relies on extremely small sample sizes. And as usual, the study itself has at least some degree of respect for this nuance; it's the media that is really twisting these conclusions into something they're not.

One example: In the study, which followed 1,048 joggers in Denmark, only FIFTY of them reported running more than four hours per week. That's a pathetically small amount of running (and a pathetically small number of people). Of this group, one died in the 12-year follow-up. Similar single-digit death counts occurred in all of the groups you'd be interested in (>2.5 hrs of running per day, >3 runs per week, many runs at a "fast" pace). The confidence intervals are quite large on these samples, no doubt because of how small the sample sizes are.

The core problem with what the media is reporting about this is that they are equating a nonsignificant outcome with the absence of an effect, i.e. people think that the lack of statistical significance between death rates of sedentary people and death rates of the very small groups of joggers who made it out the door more than a few times a week is evidence that too much running = just as dangerous as being sedentary, instead of being evidence that small sample sizes = unreliable statistics.

Oh well. I guess "not enough people actually run enough to get some solid numbers" wasn't going to make any headlines.

I could not agree more with you - I want to be long gone before I am unable to control my bladder/bowel movements.

Is the study really any surprise? Look at people you know in your own lives. I know in mine, the oldest people didn't exercise. They lived vigorous lives, but never so much as went on a walk for a walk's sake.

Citizen Runner wrote:

Precious Roy wrote:

You just cannot make any conclusions based on that kind of sample size.

Sure you can, you just have larger uncertainty intervals as they show in their analysis.

To be fair, any such study has it's limitations, which is fine if they are documented. The problem is that most of this information is distributed through the popular press to an audience that has no appetite for nuance.

I imagine the statistical problem isn't so much that ~100 subjects is a small sample as it is that very few of these people happen to die during the study.

Bingham John P wrote:

However, strenuous joggers - people who ran faster than 7 mph for more than four hours a week; or who ran faster than 7 mph for more than 2.5 hours a week with a frequency of more than three times a week - had a mortality rate that "is not statistically different from that of the sedentary group," the authors wrote.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/la-sci-sn-running-health-20150202-story.html

Yeah, but who has a better quality of life?

Bingham John P wrote:

Danish study shows most of you will die the same time as a couch potato

Considering that there are BILLIONS of couch potatoes in the world it should not be surprising that at least one of them will die at approximately the same time that I do. Did they really need to do a "study" to figure that out?