It's not true. There aren't any good studies of this that I know of. I can only tell you my experience and that of my colleagues. Back in the day, fluorescent lamp manufacturers started to develop "energy saving" T8 lamps, which had the wattage reduced from 32 to 28 and then even 25 watts. Soon after these started getting installed on existing electronic ballasts, the ballasts started dying left and right. It's probably contradictory to what you would normally think, but it happened. It had something to do with the slight differences between the standard lamp's specs and the energy saving lamp's specs.
My experience with Type A LED tubes is that they're easier on the ballasts than those energy saving fluorescents were because we dont see the same level of ballast failures after a change out. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that they extend the life of the ballast either.
Side note: What a Type A tube WILL do is expose an existing ballast that is near death. In this case, if the capacitor inside the ballast isn't capable of sustaining a good current to the sockets, the LED tube will only come on very dim or not at all, whereas the flourescent will come on full and you'd never know the ballast is about to die.
CD
