Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2018 December 2

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December 2

Did Ronald Reagan's assassination attempt affect his life expectancy?

Did John Hinckley's unsuccessful attempt to kill Ronald Reagan have any impact on Reagan's life expectancy? Has anyone ever commented or speculated about this?

Reagan was the oldest U.S. President ever at the time of his death and I wonder if he could have lived longer if he hadn't been shot back in 1981. Futurist110 (talk) 04:01, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

I can't imagine that there would be any connection. See Death_and_state_funeral_of_Ronald_Reagan#Death. Reagan had gone through a decade of Alzheimer's disease. I can't see any link between that and the injuries he sustained in the assassination attempt. According to our article Attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, "Reagan was struck by a single bullet that broke a rib, punctured a lung, and caused serious internal bleeding". I can't easily see how those injuries could be linked to either pneumonia or Alzheimer's 23 years later. Eliyohub (talk) 12:07, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Although there is no definitive link, there are many possible links. A large scale injury like that will inevitably lead to immune system activation and inflammation, and these are strongly linked to AD through activating microglia, see for instance here, here, or here. Just one plausible link between the shooting and AD. Fgf10 (talk) 12:27, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

"Reagan was the oldest U.S. President ever at the time of his death" Reagan was 93-years-old and was suffering from a disorder causing neurodegeneration for at least a decade. Our article on him mentions that there were peculiar episodes of Reagan forgetting things or failing to recognize his own cabinet members as early as 1981, but that there is no agreement on whether these were early signs of Alzheimer's or caused by other factors. (Was he wearing his eyeglasses? He was suffering from "poor eyesight" at least since the 1940s.) Nancy Reagan was also convinced that Reagan's mental health was affected by a horse-riding accident in 1989 (he was thrown off a horse and suffered head trauma), but there is not enough evidence that the accident had any long-term effects on his health. Dimadick (talk) 13:18, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

• The problem with questions like this is that it's applying a statistical concept (being life expectancy) to an individual person. It doesn't really work that way, concepts that are built on many millions of people cannot be individualized meaningfully down to the person. He did not die of his injuries, nor of any complications of his injuries. Excepting the nebulous effect of generalized inflammation on development of neurogenerative disorders, noted above, there's nothing in the cause of his death which could have reasonably been attributed to the injuries sustained by his gunshot wound. --Jayron32 18:07, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Reagan was the oldest U S president ever at the time of his death and remained so until Friday, when that honour passed to George H W Bush. Jimmy Carter (who shares his birthday but not his birth year with Theresa May) is 94. 2A02:C7F:8230:8F00:5142:DE0B:C770:E83E (talk) 18:37, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

If my arithmetic is correct, Gerald Ford outlived Reagan by a month or so. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:26, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Good ol' Wikipedia to the rescue: Gerald Ford - "At the time of his death he was the longest-lived president in American history, a record he held until George H. W. Bush surpassed him on November 25, 2017." -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:11, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

And as 2A02 semi-implicitly points out, Jimmy Carter is a few months away from becoming the longest-lived President. Although, when you get into your 90s, you can't count on anything. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:13, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

See List of presidents of the United States by age.51.140.123.26 (talk) 08:41, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Emperor Meiji

When did Emperor Meiji cut his hair to the more Western style short hairstyle? KAVEBEAR (talk) 04:37, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Two of the sources I'm finding say he cut his topknot in 1872, another says 1873, and a fourth finds the evidence conflicts between 1872 and 1873. [1][2] --Antiquary (talk) 09:42, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

"The Meiji government decreed in 1871 that men should remove their topknots, and the Meiji emperor himself cut his hair the following year". Domesticated Modern: Hybrid Houses in Meiji Japan, 1870-1900 (p. 229) Don Hoon Choi, University of California, Berkeley, 2003.

The 1871 decree was called the dampatsurei, which gets a mention in Wikipedia in Haitōrei Edict. No more luck with more references though. Alansplodge (talk) 20:39, 2 December 2018 (UTC)