- Cost: Court fees of tens of Chinese yuan per session, and about two hours each week. Finding partners and a court, then keeping up the weekly routine, can be difficult.
- In plain language: In the cited study, people who played racket sports had approximately half the mortality risk of people who did not play those sports; cardiovascular mortality risk was about 56% lower. Swimming was associated with about 28% lower overall mortality risk. Running and football showed no statistically significant difference in this dataset.
- Benefit: A British cohort study followed 80,306 adults, comparing participants in each sport with people who did not participate in that sport. Racket sports were associated with about 47% lower all-cause mortality risk (hazard ratio 0.53; 95% confidence interval 0.40–0.69) and about 56% lower cardiovascular mortality risk (0.44; 0.24–0.83). The study grouped badminton, tennis and squash as racket sports; table tennis was not in that definition. The corresponding two estimates were 0.72 and 0.59 for swimming, and 0.73 and 0.64 for aerobics; the all-cause estimate for cycling was 0.85. Running and football showed no statistically significant difference.
- Evidence grade: A, as assigned by the Chinese source; not an independent RecheckNest approval.
- Source: Oja P, Kelly P, Pedisic Z, et al. (2017). Associations of specific types of sports and exercise with all-cause and cardiovascular-disease mortality: a cohort study of 80 306 British adults. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 51(10), 812–817. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2016-096822
- Notes: The Chinese source flags this interpretation as disputed. This is observational research: racket-sport participants may already be healthier and have more social contact. The lack of a statistically significant result for running may also reflect who chooses each sport. Do not infer that running is ineffective from this result. Other entries in chapter 2 address overall exercise volume. These associations do not establish that taking up a particular sport will cause the reported risk reduction.
Source correction pending publication review: The Chinese title and body include table tennis, but the cited study defines racket sports as badminton, tennis and squash. This draft corrects that scope without changing the archived Chinese source. The article’s discussion also says 59% lower cardiovascular mortality in one sentence, whereas its abstract, results and reported hazard ratio 0.44 imply 56%; the draft follows the reported estimate and retains the discrepancy in the review record.
Study limitations: The cardiovascular analysis excluded participants with cardiovascular disease at baseline and included 75,014 adults aged at least 30; there were nine cardiovascular deaths among 2,883 racket-sport participants. The authors note few events and limited statistical power, residual confounding, seasonal and short-recall measurement, and unmeasured participation changes. A nonsignificant running result does not establish that selection explains the findings.