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Background: People who are physically active have at least a 30% lower risk of death during follow-up compared with those who are inactive. However, the ideal dose of exercise for improving longevity is uncertain., Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the association between jogging and long-term, all-cause mortality by focusing specifically on the effects of pace, quantity, and frequency of jogging., Methods: As part of the Copenhagen City Heart Study, 1,098 healthy joggers and 3,950 healthy nonjoggers have been prospectively followed up since 2001. Cox proportional hazards regression analysis was performed with age as the underlying time scale and delayed entry., Results: Compared with sedentary nonjoggers, 1 to 2.4 h of jogging per week was associated with the lowest mortality (multivariable hazard ratio [HR]: 0.29; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.11 to 0.80). The optimal frequency of jogging was 2 to 3 times per week (HR: 0.32; 95% CI: 0.15 to 0.69) or ≤1 time per week (HR: 0.29; 95% CI: 0.12 to 0.72). The optimal pace was slow (HR: 0.51; 95% CI: 0.24 to 1.10) or average (HR: 0.38; 95% CI: 0.22 to 0.66). The joggers were divided into light, moderate, and strenuous joggers. The lowest HR for mortality was found in light joggers (HR: 0.22; 95% CI: 0.10 to 0.47), followed by moderate joggers (HR: 0.66; 95% CI: 0.32 to 1.38) and strenuous joggers (HR: 1.97; 95% CI: 0.48 to 8.14)., Conclusions: The findings suggest a U-shaped association between all-cause mortality and dose of jogging as calibrated by pace, quantity, and frequency of jogging. Light and moderate joggers have lower mortality than sedentary nonjoggers, whereas strenuous joggers have a mortality rate not statistically different from that of the sedentary group., (Copyright © 2015 American College of Cardiology Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Since 1970, jogging has become an increasingly popular form of exercise, but concern about harmful effects has been raised following reports of deaths during jogging. The purpose of this study was to investigate if jogging, which can be very vigorous, is associated with increased all-cause mortality in men and women. Jogging habits were recorded in a random sample of 17,589 healthy men and women aged 20-98 years, invited between 1976 and 2003 to the Copenhagen City Heart Study. The expected lifetime was calculated by integrating the predicted survival curve estimated in the Cox model. In this study 1,878 persons (1,116 men and 762 women) were classified as joggers. During the 35-year maximum follow-up period, we registered 122 deaths among joggers and 10,158 deaths among nonjoggers. The age-adjusted hazard ratio of death among joggers was 0.56 (95% confidence interval: 0.46, 0.67) for men and 0.56 (95% confidence interval: 0.40, 0.80) for women. The age-adjusted increase in survival with jogging was 6.2 years in men and 5.6 years in women. This long-term study of joggers showed that jogging was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality and a substantial increase in survival for both men and women.