We are often told that living a sedentary lifestyle is a risk factor for…everything, and will shorten our lives significantly. So how is it that Stephen Hawking, who apparently couldn’t move much more than his face since ~1970, managed to survive for 50 years? Good genes?
…and father children!*
- He would see a doctor regularly pretty much since his diagnosis and get care.
- ALS is progressive, you generally don’t go from Ok to wheelchair confined overnight. His disease progressed slowly and initially, for about 10 or so years he was fairly “normal” functioning. Fun fact, the loss of his voice was not attributable to ALS, but to surgery, he had due to a bout of pneumonia in the mid-1980 's
*ALS does not affect the reproductive system and when his first two were born he was still walking and functioning normally. The third was born post wheelchair but when he was much more active then he was when he came into the public eye.
I’m pretty sure Hawking had physical therapy and a controlled diet.
His ‘lifestyle’ put him into a higher risk group. For example, if people have do exercise (being very simple here) , then rates for heart disease, diabetes, depression go up.
Doesn’t mean 100% of the people in a group of 1-2 billion die before they are 50.
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Physically active people have life expediencies about 2-5 yearslonger than sedentary people. Seeing how life expectancy is about ~80, that would mean a sedentary person may live to 78 while an active person would live to 81 or so. There is a difference, but it isn’t like sedentary people are dropping like flies in their 40s. Poor lifestyle (smoking, obesity, alcoholism, bad diet, sedentary lifestyle, high stress, poor sleep, etc) kills you, but generally not until your 70s. Generally speaking, poor lifestyle accelerates death and decay from aging, but its not going to kill you until your late 60s at the earliest.
So a sedentary person living to 76 isn’t unexpected. What is unexpected is him living that long with ALS.
A cousin of mine, who was confined to a wheelchair due to a drunk driver, had a therapist who came by twice a month to do extensive stretching & massage on the unused muscles on his lower body. I’d think someone like Professor Hawking would have that even more often, to try to keep his body in as good a condition as possible. Didn’t he have full-time nursing care?
Here’s an interesting Scientific American article from 2012, about Hawking and ALS. It notes that there are a number of different forms of the disease, and that the fact that Hawking developed it at age 21 (it’s more commonly developed after age 50) may have indicated that he had a particular (and uncommon) form of the disease that tends to be much slower in its progression.
And, in answer to t-bonham@scc.net’s question about his nursing care, from Wikipedia:
of course maybe he would have lived 20 more years if he wasn’t chair bound
His father lived to be 80. His mother lived to be 98. So in only living to the age of 76, he died tragically young.
There are a lot of quadriplegics with no use of their body. Electric wheelchairs give them mobility.
Good nursing care makes all the difference in their health & lifespans.
Not long before he died, I saw Christopher Reeve on TV “riding a bike”. His upper body was strapped in place, as were his feet, and the bike pedals were being spun by an engine. This was done to keep his joints and muscles from freezing up.
And my mother had a FOAF who was in a persistent vegetative state for about 15 years after a car accident. 
Several times a month, a physical therapist came into her nursing home and bent all her joints for the same reason, and I read that the same thing was done to Karen Ann Quinlan.
Zero aerobic exercise, yes but think about it, the guy could barely move, its not like his heart would have to be very strong to pump essentially just enough to keep him alive right? I mean if you are completely sedentary but weigh 300 pounds and are getting up there in age, we all have times when we run, lift heavy objects, get stressed out, cut grass or do yardwork under a lot of strain in the hot sun, a person like that being sedentary, while still having to semi-routinely do activities that may greatly raise their heart rate, a person like that I could imagine dropping dead of a massive heart attack or something.
Sunny von Bülow also lived to the age of 76, 28 years of which were spent in a persistent vegetative state.
Maybe not, but SH wasn’t sedentary in the sense that “he never got much exercise other than walking from his bed to his car and his car to his office, and maybe mowing the lawn once a week”; he was utterly sessile for several decades. Regular PT may keep the joints limber and avoid deep-vein thrombosis, but it’s not the aerobic activity that health professionals tell us to engage in ~20 minutes per day a few times a week. ISTM that this would have resulted in in being at very high risk for strokes and heart attacks on a much shorter time scale than he lived. Chalk it up to uncommonly good genes, I guess? President Trump’s doctor similarly ascribed Trump’s continued existence (despite an unhealthy diet, advanced age, and lack of regular aerobic exercise) to good genes, so I guess that’s a plausible explanation.
Or exercise is vastly over-rated. Kind of like the 10 glasses of water I don’t drink every day; how come I’m so healthy?
Yeah but again, people who exercise have a life expectancy 2-5 years longer than people who are sedentary. So if life expectancy is 80 then the sedentary may have a life expectancy of 78 while the physically active have a life expectancy of 81 or 82.
Poor lifestyle generally doesn’t kill you until you are 70 years old at least. Even terrible lifestyle choices tend to only take about ~10 years off life expectancy. So if life expectancy is 80, then people with terrible lifestyles will have a life expectancy of 70.
Well, sure, Hawking was at risk of a lot of things due to being immobile, but on the other hand he wasn’t obese, presumably wasn’t abusing drugs or alcohol, and wasn’t attempting to do things like shoveling snow which can precipitate heart attacks. And probably had some good genes, too. So, some good habits offsetting the effect of not being able to do aerobic exercise. Also good medical care.
Regardless of how it seems to you, the statistics indicate that this is not the case.
Fair enough. Maybe I’ve just been watching too many scary news pieces screaming “if you sit too long, you’re gonna die young” at me. :o
I think the real issue in promoting strokes and heart attacks is obesity rather then sedentariness per se. Of course sedentariness and obesity are linked, but merely being sedentary without additional risk factors is less of a problem.