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Comment by smackay | Hacker News Reader

Female and male US Olympic athletes live 5 years longer than their general population counterparts: a study of 8124 former US Olympians

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/4/206

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What about USSR Olympic athletes? Especially before USSR collapse.

Salient words at the very start of the article are "former athletes... suffer from poverty". East German Olympic athletes suffered poverty, which is a risk factor in any part of the world.

That's why I am asking about USSR statistics before USSR collapse - at that time weightlifters were treated very well, much like at US today, if not better.

It may be a little hard to do this though, the athletes often weren't aware they were doping and to what degree, so you don't really have a good way to split them into doped/non-doped cohorts to do this sort of analysis.

I am talking about poverty, primarily. Athletes from Eastern Germany were trown into poverty when two halves of Germany reunited.

Using USSR and/or Eastern Germany athletes prior to the reunion would provide some kind of baseline to compare to. As well as contemporary US athletes.

Yea but the (former) East German population lives a lot healthier than the general US population.

While Eastern Germans on average lived >4 years longer than a USAmerican in 1991, that lead has evaporated as of now: US citizens live a couple of months longer than Eastern Germans (and Western Germans).

[1] https://www.rki.de/EN/Content/Health_Monitoring/Health_Repor...

[2] https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?utm_medium=explore...

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