Most U.S. Presidents Live Beyond Average Life Expectancy
[Writer] This is research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago. Today, Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology, talks about his recent research letter in JAMA — the Journal of the American Medical Association — that finds most U.S. presidents live beyond average life expectancy.
Here’s professor Olshansky:
[Olshansky] So here’s what happened. This summer, summer of 2011, President Obama came back to Chicago to celebrate his 50th birthday. And there were some news stories about how gray he looked. He seemed to look much older, his skin was wrinkling and his hair had seemed to have changed quite rapidly just within the couple of years.
So the news reporters interviewed some physicians about the aging of President Obama and the aging of presidents in general. And the conclusion that this physician and some others had come to, in books and other publications, was that American presidents age quite rapidly. And in fact they were very specific in their prediction and they said U.S. presidents age at twice the normal rate.
All right – so what exactly does aging at twice the normal rate mean? Well you can interpret it in various ways but the obvious interpretation is for every day you’re in office you age two days. So if you were in office for four years, you age eight years. If you were in office for eight years, you age 16 years during the time in which you were in office. Now we know in the world of biology that you can’t actually measure the aging of an
individual. There isn’t any single test that you can take or blood that you can take that will actually measure how long you’ve aged from point A to point B, nor can you use any of those tests to predict specifically how long an individual will live. But what you can do is the most obvious thing of all. And that is you can compare how long U.S. presidents would have been expected to live based on data during the year in which they were inaugurated and you can compare that to how long they actually lived. It was incredible simple.
So I went back and began collecting data for the U.S., and of course reliable statistics for the U.S. population go back to about 1900. And then prior to 1900 I had to use data from other countries that had very reliable mortality statistics for people who were the average age of presidents at inauguration, which was about age 55. I ended up choosing data from France as an example. I could have chosen some Scandinavian countries, but there’s really only a handful of countries that have reliable data at these ages going back for a couple of hundred years and as it turns out it wouldn’t have mattered which one I had chosen because they were all fairly close. So I felt very comfortable with the quality of the data that I was looking at and I had to remove from the analysis presidents who had died from gunshot. There were four presidents who had died from gunshot. So I was basically looking at the predicted longevity of 34 presidents who died from natural causes and I compared it to how long they actually lived. And then I actually, I’ll tell you about this in a moment, I actually looked at the predicted longevity of living presidents and I can compare that to how long they are currently alive and what is predicted for them.
Well the conclusion that I came to was the exact opposite of what you will see frequently in the literature, and the exact opposite of the conclusion that was come to by that physician who said U.S. president’s age at twice the normal rate. The fact is, is that 23 of the 34 U.S. presidents who died from natural causes lived longer, and in many instances significantly longer, than what was predicted for them during the year in which they were inaugurated.
So it was rather a remarkable statistic that I was actually a bit surprised. And I will tell you that there were one, two, three, four other presidents who came very close to living beyond what was predicted for them.
Now remember when I did these calculations I assumed exactly what these physicians had predicted. I assumed that American presidents aged at twice the normal rate. Right? So for President Regan, for example, who was in office for eight years I subtracted 16 years from his life span and he lived way beyond what was predicted for him. And as it turns out, the observed average lifespan of the first , I think it’s nine or ten U.S. presidents, was about 80 years. The observed lifespan was 80 years during a time in which life expectancy in the U.S. population was about 40. Actually I think it was under 40 for men, perhaps significantly under 40. That’s the observed longevity of females today.
So the very early U.S. presidents and the most recent U.S. presidents have done exceptionally well.
And as it turns out, living presidents – Carter, the first Bush – are living way beyond what was predicted for them during the year in which they were inaugurated. And predictions now indicate that President Obama – oh, and Carter also has lived much longer – President Obama and President Clinton are predicted to live longer.
Clinton has had some health issues as you know recently with regard to his heart, but if you look back on the history of most of these presidents many of them have had issues and they’ve all pretty much died of the same things that everyone else in the population dies from, which is heart disease, cancer and stroke.
Now if you read some of the literature on the health of U.S. presidents what you will discover is that they are frequently talking about problems that they had; problems with their back, or problems with hearing, or with sinusitis, or a number of other issues as if this is some sort of unique event that occurs only to U.S. presidents. But guess what? It happens to everyone when they grow older. And the kinds of things that you see described in U.S. presidents, the rest of us experience when we grow older as well. And actually if you were to take the history of most individuals who made it out into their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s in some instances and you chronicle everything that goes wrong with them every year, you’ll actually run into a story that’s nearly identical to the ones that you see for the U.S. presidents.
Now, do the U.S. presidents experience accelerated aging of their skin and their hair? Do you see a more rapid graying of the hair in U.S. presidents? Now I actually don’t know the answer to this question. No one, that I know of, has actually ever looked to see whether this is true. So actually I don’t know whether or not it’s true. What we do know is that if you take any 50 year old man, or 40 year old man, and you follow them for four years or eight years, chances are they’re going to be losing the hair that they have and that the hair that they have that’s left, much of it or in many instances a significant portion of it, will turn gray. So 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.
[Writer] S. Jay Olshansky is a professor in epidemiology and biostatistics at the UIC School of Public Health.
For more information about this research, go to www.today.uic.edu, click on “news releases,” and look for the release dated Dec. 6, 2011.
This has been research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago.
