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A New Study Found That Politicians Live Longer Than The Rest Of Us

davidevison - stock.adobe.com - illustrative purpose only, not the actual person

In a new multi-national study conducted by the University of Oxford, researchers found that politicians typically live longer than the general population.

Over the past decades, medical advancements that lead to increased life expectancies and the growing wealth disparity have sparked a renewed interest in whether or not certain “high-status” occupations are associated with better health.

The study, published in the European Journal of Epidemiology, collected and combined data on political figures from eleven high-income countries– including Austria, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the U.S., and the U.K.

Each country had available data spanning from 1945 to 2017. However, the complete data analysis ranged from 1816 to 2017.

Over fifty-seven thousand politicians were used in this study, of which just over forty thousand have died.

The researchers first matched politicians’ countries of citizenship, age, and gender with mortality data from the same section of the national population during each respective time period.

Afterward, the team then compared the yearly frequency of deaths among politicians against the mortality rates of the general population.

The scientists’ analysis resulted in numerous significant findings. First, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, politicians and the general population had similar mortality rates.

But, this changed rapidly during the twentieth century as mortality rate differences grew more significant and political figures increasingly outlived the “non-elite.”

davidevison – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purpose only, not the actual person

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