Leading a Nation Takes Years Off Life, Study Suggests

President Obama and Mitt Romney at the end of a presidential debate in October 2012. A study found elected heads of government lived fewer years than the candidates they defeated. CreditPablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

New research may offer a consolation prize for whichever presidential nominee comes up short next November: Losing could mean a longer life.

Whether heads of government die prematurely is a long-debated question, and research has yielded conflicting results. For example, one study held that presidents might age twice as quickly as the overall American population while in office. Another study found no significant effect on the life expectancies of American presidents.

Now, the largest statistical study of its kind, examining elections held in 17 countries from 1722 to 2015, has found that elected heads of government lived 2.7 fewer years and experienced a 23 percent greater risk of premature death than the defeated office seekers. The BMJ, a British medical journal, published the paper in its Christmas issue, which traditionally features peer-reviewed papers that examine quirky topics.

The analysis tested the hypothesis that elected presidents, prime ministers and chancellors experience accelerated aging and premature death because of the stresses of political life. The authors compared 279 elected heads of government with the 261 runners-up whom they defeated and who never served as heads of state. The researchers determined the number of years each competitor lived after the last election in which they ran, and compared the findings with the average life span for an individual of the same age and sex in each candidate’s country during the election year.

The team did not specify in the paper whether the candidates who lost did so in primaries or final elections. Dr. Anupam B. Jena of Harvard Medical School, the study’s senior author, said in an email that his team defined the runners-up as candidates who were never president or prime minister but could have served in Congress or parliament or held other offices. The paper did not address whether congressional or parliamentary leadership positions might affect longevity.

Dr. Jena’s team said earlier studies of elected leaders that found no ill effects on health and longevity had sample sizes that were too small to detect statistically significant differences. So his team devised its study to overcome such limitations.

In one of those earlier studies, from 2011, S. Jay Olshansky, an expert in aging at the University of Illinois at Chicago, reported that most presidents of the United States lived longer than other American men their age.

Dr. Olshansky said in an interview by email that he welcomed the new study because it was broader and set out to answer questions his analysis was not made to address.

But Dr. Olshansky said he was disappointed by the new study for two principal reasons.

First, he said, the authors did not eliminate “causes of death that were unrelated to aging, such as being at the wrong end of a gun,” which could have affected the findings.

Second, he said, authors of the new study “provide no measure of accelerated aging” and thus could not effectively test that part of their hypothesis. Although his study began with the assumption that a United States president lost two days of life for every day in office, he still found that such leaders “did not experience accelerated aging.”

“Most of the changes we see in the form of gray hair and wrinkles observed in presidents and other political leaders during their time in office is normal aging that occurs to everyone during this phase of life,” Dr. Olshansky said. “We don’t die of gray hair and wrinkled skin.”

In addition to Dr. Jena, the authors of the new study were Andrew R. Olenski, a health care policy research assistant at Harvard Medical School, and Matthew V. Abola, a medical student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. A grant from the National Institutes of Health paid for the study.

The researchers chose the 17 countries because of their similarity to France and Britain, for which reliable life tables exist dating to the 19th century. Life table data does not go back to the 18th century, Dr. Jena said, so his team estimated comparable life expectancies based on early 19th-century data. The authors cautioned that the findings cannot be generalized to other countries.

Source:     Leading A Nation Takes Years Off Life - Study Suggests