Longevity Briefs: Do Olympic Champions Age More Slowly?

Longevity briefs provides a short summary of novel research in biology, medicine, or biotechnology that caught the attention of our researchers in Oxford, due to its potential to improve our health, wellbeing, and longevity.

The problem:

Exercise appears to slow ageing, extending average lifespan and delaying the onset of age-related diseases. Olympic athletes train exceptionally hard, often from a young age, so they make an interesting group to study. In this study, researchers wanted to investigate the relationship between such intense long term exercise training and ageing in more detail, including how different types of Olympic athletes compare to each other. 

To do this, they used multiple epigenetic clocks. These are algorithms that estimate someone’s age based on DNA methylation (chemical modifications that affect how the genetic code is read but without altering the code itself). If someone’s epigenetic age is estimated to be lower than their actual (chronological) age, this suggests that they may be ageing more slowly than average.

The discovery:

The researchers looked at DNA methylation data from 59 Hungarian Olympic gold medallists, 49 of whom were male, and compared them to 329 controls. 205 of those controls were master rowers (participants in the World Rowing Masters Regatta) while the remainder were healthy but untrained. The average (mean) age of the Olympians was 53 and 52 for males and females respectively, while for the controls it was 58 and 60.

After adjusting for the fact that controls were older on average, they found that in each gender, half or more of the clocks used showed no statistically significant difference in epigenetic age between olympic medallists and controls, while two clocks (SkinBlood and PhenoAge in males, SkinBlood and Hannum in females) showed a statistically significant slowing of epigenetic ageing. They also predicted longer telomere length in Olympic medallists compared to non-medallists, which could be indicative of slower ageing.

Breaking down the data further, the study made some interesting observations. The first was that in male Olympians who had won their last gold medal within the previous 10 years, several clocks showed epigenetic ageing to be significantly slowed compared to those who won their medals longer ago. However, in female Olympians this relationship was reversed – more recent medallists appeared to be ageing more rapidly compared with medallists from longer ago. The researchers also compared different sports for which there were at least three athletes and found that wrestling appeared to be associated with faster epigenetic ageing compared to gymnastics, fencing and water polo.

Finally, the researchers looked at which genes were differently affected by epigenetic modifications in Olympians vs non-Olympians. They found that of these differently methylated genes, many were related to the control of cellular signalling, division, T cell development, telomere maintenance and tumour suppression.

The implications:

This study suggests that early and intense physical training typical of Olympic athletes positively impacts epigenetic ageing, and that this impact lasts long after they have passed their prime. Due to the small numbers of female participants and representatives for each individual sport, we should be cautious about reading too much into gender and sport-specific comparisons. Factors like hormonal differences between men and women could influence the effects of intense exercise training at different stages of life. Different sports also involve different diets and training routines, so linking a sport itself to more or less benefit is not straightforward.