What racquet sports track with

This one is a different shape from a long follow-up of a single city. It pooled household surveys of 80,306 adults across England and Scotland, asked what they played, and looked at who was still alive years later.

Racket players came out with roughly half the all-cause mortality of people who did not play, and a little under half the cardiovascular mortality. Swimming, aerobics and cycling all showed a smaller association in the same direction. The ranges around those figures are wide enough to be worth remembering — this is a signal, not a measurement.

The part usually left out is that two of the most popular sports in the survey showed no significant association at all. Running and football did not separate from not playing, in this cohort. That does not mean they do nothing; it means this dataset could not see it, and a page reporting only the sports that scored well would be selecting its own result.

As with every study on this page, nobody was assigned their sport. Whatever leads a person to still be playing a racket sport in middle age may be doing part of the work, and this design cannot take that apart.