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To the Editor: Studies on the long-term survival of athletes have yielded conflicting results.^1-2 We investigated whether the mortality rates of elite athletes varies by participation in different types of sports and how they differ from those of the general population.

Methods

We assessed the mortality of all 2009 male athletes who had represented Finland in international competitions from 1920 to 1965³ and were alive in January 1971. Cause-specific deaths from 1971 through 1995 were obtained from Statistics Finland. This database provides virtually complete population mortality data so that cause of death was undefined in only 0.2% of cases. We ranked sports based on average maximal oxygen uptake⁴ as follows: endurance (highest maximal oxygen uptake), mixed (medium maximal oxygen uptake), and power (lowest maximal oxygen uptake). We computed the standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) for each subgroup of athletes and also compared ratios of the SMRs of the subgroups.

Results
Table 1 . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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