Human lifespan has been increasing over recent decades and is expected to swell again after a setback caused by the pandemic, with one scientist predicting that a man born in 1970 could live until 141, and females, up to a maximum of 131-years-old.
The research, which looks at the longest known human life expectancy, has claimed that if there is a maximum human lifespan, it is still far away from being reached.
Dr David McCarthy, an academic at the University of Georgia, has created a model that projects how the maximum human lifespan will extend in the future, saying it is likely there is one person born in Britain in the 1940s who will live beyond 122, which marks the currently known oldest person ever.
Jeanne Calment died on 4 August 1997, aged 122 years and 164 days, and is the oldest ever known person.
McCarthy told The Telegraph: “Our data show that the longest lived UK female born in 1940 could live until between 120 and 128, and it is roughly the same for men.”
He added that 115-years-old is the point where a person has a 50-50 likelihood of surviving another year.
Men traditionally live shorter lives than women, but a recent study suggests this may be due to lifestyle factors and that, biologically, they may be able to outlive females.
McCarthy warned, however, that the more recent data were less reliable than estimates of pre-war life expectancy, because there was not a big enough dataset of people.
“The more recent the cohort, the less precise our estimates are,” he said.
“For the very recent cohorts, it looks as if there is this period of postponement for cohorts in the UK born between 1920 and 1914, and the statistical evidence in favour of that seems to be quite strong.”
However, the data are not yet strong enough to be sure about post-war maximum life expectancy, he said. It is possible it continues to grow, but it could also grind to a halt.
“If the model is correct, and the environment continues to be supportive of the extreme longevity of older people, then it looks likely that someone in the UK born in 1940 will live longer than 120,” he said.
“But all predictions about the future end up being wrong. So I wouldn’t say this is a fact.”
The findings are based on an analysis of mortality rates going back more than three centuries across 19 countries, and McCarthy describes the implications as “profound.”
For most of recorded human history, the average life expectancy has been between 20 and 40 years. Today, humans live to be around 80.
The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Study details
Mortality postponement and compression at older ages in human cohorts
David McCarthy ,Po-Lin Wang
Published In PLOS ONE on 29 March 2023
Abstract
A key but unresolved issue in the study of human mortality at older ages is whether mortality is being compressed (which implies that we may be approaching a maximum limit to the length of life) or postponed (which would imply that we are not). We analyze historical and current population mortality data between ages 50 and 100 by birth cohort in 19 currently-industrialized countries, using a Bayesian technique to surmount cohort censoring caused by survival, to show that while the dominant historical pattern has been one of mortality compression, there have been occasional episodes of mortality postponement. The pattern of postponement and compression across different birth cohorts explain why longevity records have been slow to increase in recent years: we find that cohorts born between around 1900 and 1950 are experiencing historically unprecedented mortality postponement, but are still too young to break longevity records. As these cohorts attain advanced ages in coming decades, longevity records may therefore increase significantly. Our results confirm prior work suggesting that if there is a maximum limit to the human lifespan, we are not yet approaching it.
The Telegraph article – Are you a man born in 1970? You might live to be 141 (Restricted access)
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Men age faster than women, but younger generation is closing the gap
Why people in ‘Blue Zones’ live longer
The Longevity Diet: How nutrition affects ageing and healthy lifespan – US analysis
Mystery of why humans die around 80 may finally be solved – Cambridge study