Longer lives of US Presidents contrary to popular belief

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDDec 7 2011

According to Dr. Michael Roizen U.S. Presidents may be aging twice as fast as the rest of us while they occupy the Oval Office. Roizen, chairman of the Wellness Institute at the esteemed Cleveland Clinic, is the developer of RealAge, whose premise is that one’s calendar age isn’t necessarily in sync with the actual wear and tear on the body.

Roizen told CNN that “The typical person who lives one year ages one year. The typical President ages two years for every year they are in office.” In August, when Obama celebrated his 50th birthday, CBS News repeated the claim that “presidents undergo a process of accelerated aging while in office,” citing the CNN report. Commentators dwelled on the gray hair above Obama’s temples, the deepening creases around his mouth and the bags under his eyes that seemed to betray the weariness in one of the most stressful jobs on earth.

This hypothesis was taken up by S. Jay Olshansky, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health. He looked at the age of each U.S. president when he was inaugurated, along with his age at death if he died of natural causes. He excluded Presidents who were killed in office. Based on the age at inauguration, Olshansky used life tables from the Social Security Administration to calculate each president’s remaining life expectancy. But he modified that life expectancy by subtracting two days of remaining life for each day in the White House. For presidents who served during the 1700s and 1800s, he used life tables from the French Human Mortality Database, since there were no U.S. records at that time.

Of the 34 presidents who died of natural causes, 23 lived longer than his modified life expectancy. Olshansky calculated that for these presidents, their average estimated age at death was 67.0 years, but in real life they lived to an average age of 78.0 years. For the 11 presidents who died before reaching their estimated life expectancy (which was 67.8 years, on average), their average age at actual death was 62.1 years. Among American presidents, some have been exceptionally long-lived. Four of them survived into their nineties. Gerald Ford was 93.5 when he died; Reagan 93.3; John Adams 90.7; and Herbert Hoover, 90.2. His results were published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Olshansky concluded that U.S. presidents lived longer than expected in about two-thirds of cases. He added, “all living presidents have either already exceeded the estimated life span of all U.S. men at their age of inauguration or are likely to do so.”

Olshansky gave two explanations for his findings. He said in order to live long enough to become president, all of the men in the study had already survived “the most perilous early years of life.” Also all but 10 of the presidents had three other things going for them – a college education, wealth and access to the best medical care at the time. Studies have linked these three factors to longevity.

“The graying of hair and wrinkling of skin seen in presidents while in office are normal elements of human aging,” Orshansky wrote. “Even if these signs of aging did appear at a faster rate for presidents, this study shows that this does not mean that their lives are shortened.”