Although US Presidents appear to be aging rapidly before our very eyes year after year, they tend to have longer life spans than their peers, a researcher from the University of Illinois, Chicago, reported in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association). The author found that out of all the 34 US Presidents who died naturally, 23 lived longer than the life-expectancy of a man of their age at the time of their inauguration. Presidents all benefit from several factors that contribute to a long life, such as access to top medical care, higher levels of education and personal wealth, compared to the national average.
Author, S. Jay Olshansky, a demographer, explains that it is really a myth that US Presidents age at twice the normal rate. Because they are seen so frequently week after week, month after month, and then year after year, the public is witness to their physical features all the time – Presidents are in the public eye, so their aging is carefully scrutinized.
Olshansky noticed that on President Obama’s fiftieth-year celebration in 2011, the media had commented on how much the man had aged – he was described as having more gray in his hair, clearer and more marked wrinkles, i.e. newspapers described him as a rapidly-aging man.
Olshansky said:
“In the world of biology, we know that you can’t actually measure the aging of an individual. There isn’t any single test to actually measure how long you’ve aged from point A to point B, nor is it possible to predict specifically how long an individual will live.”
Olshansky set out to determine whether Presidents did age at twice the average rate, and also how long they were expected to live when they were inaugurated, and to compare that data with how long they eventually lived.
If a person ages at twice the normal rate, one could assume that a 4-year term in office would mean a reduction in estimated lifespan left of 8 years.
But Olshansky found that out of the 34 presidents who died from natural causes, 23 lived longer than average, and often considerably longer. The average age of US Presidents when they were inaugurated was 55.1 years. They did not include the four who had been assassinated.
President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, January 1993
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President Bill Clinton, 1999 (6 years after first photo), visiting US NATO forces in Germany
Most lay people, and even health care professionals would expect a US President to age faster and die earlier – the job is extremely stressful, decisions are made which affect the livelihood of millions of Americans and often hundreds of millions elsewhere in the world. Excessive stress is known to affect both mental and physical health.
However, Olshansky found that the first eight presidents, for example, who lived during a time when life expectancy did not even reach 40 years, lived an average of 79.8 years.
Olshansky said:
“This (79.8 years) is about how long females born in the
U.S. today live.”
All ex-Presidents who are still alive have either already lived longer than the average, or are most likely to do so, the author wrote.
Olshansky wrote:
“We know that socioeconomic status has an extremely powerful effect on longevity now, and it was likely to have been a factor in the past.
“We don’t die from gray hair and wrinkled skin. What we’re seeing in President Obama is really not inconsistent with what we see for any other man his age in the U.S. or elsewhere.”
Written by Christian Nordqvist