A recent analysis dashes the hopes that in the future, people will continue to live longer, with the researchers suggesting that peak human longevity is well below that of becoming a centenarian.
For more than a century, steady increases in life expectancy sparked hope that humans may regularly live past the age of 100 some day, but the latest findings, published in Nature Ageing, show that the best typical lifespan for most women will be around 90-years-old and just under 85 for men.
WebMD reports that the predictions are based on data from the US and Hong Kong, plus eight countries with long lifespans: Australia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.
“Most people alive today at older ages are living on time that was manufactured by medicine,” said lead author S Jay Olshansky, PhD, a University of Illinois Chicago professor of epidemiology and biostatistics. “But these medical Band-Aids are producing fewer years of life even though they’re occurring at an accelerated pace, implying that the period of rapid increases in life expectancy is now documented to be over.”
The study authors said it was possible that a major breakthrough in medicine or science could change the currently decelerating trajectory of life expectancy. The results of such a breakthrough would probably have to overcome the effects of ageing.
Olshansky noted that extending life expectancy further could be harmful because the added years may not be healthy ones.
“We should now shift our focus to efforts that slow ageing and extend healthspan,” he said, meaning that focus should be on the number of healthy years lived.
The probability of living to 100 is 5% for women and just under 2% for men, the latest analysis showed.
Hong Kong has the greatest likelihood of people living to 100, where nearly 13% of women and more than 4% of men are predicted to become centenarians.
Among those who should consider the updated life expectancy predictions, the authors wrote, are “insurance companies and actuarial firms tasked with forecasting mortality improvement factors”.
“These impact current carriers of life insurance and also the valuation of current and future insurance applicants’ policies.”
The authors concluded that “humanity’s battle for a long life has largely been accomplished”.
But, they added, what that longevity looks like may be drastically different in the future.
“Given rapid advances now occurring in geroscience, there is reason to be optimistic that a second longevity revolution is approaching in the form of modern efforts to slow biological ageing, offering humanity a second chance at altering the course of human survival,” they wrote.
“However, until it becomes possible to modulate the biological rate of ageing and fundamentally alter the primary factors that drive human health and longevity, radical life extension in already long-lived national populations remains implausible in this century.”
Study details
Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the 21st century
S. Jay Olshansky, Bradley Willcox, Lloyd Demetrius & Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez
Published in Nature Ageing on 7 October 2024
Abstract
Over the course of the twentieth century, human life expectancy at birth rose in high-income nations by approximately 30 years, largely driven by advances in public health and medicine. Mortality reduction was observed initially at an early age and continued into middle and older ages. However, it was unclear whether this phenomenon and the resulting accelerated rise in life expectancy would continue into the twenty-first century. Here using demographic survivorship metrics from national vital statistics in the eight countries with the longest-lived populations (Australia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland) and in Hong Kong and the United States from 1990 to 2019, we explored recent trends in death rates and life expectancy. We found that, since 1990, improvements overall in life expectancy have decelerated. Our analysis also revealed that resistance to improvements in life expectancy increased while lifespan inequality declined and mortality compression occurred. Our analysis suggests that survival to age 100 years is unlikely to exceed 15% for females and 5% for males, altogether suggesting that, unless the processes of biological ageing can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century.
WebMD article – Your great-grandchildren probably won’t live to 100 (Open access)
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Men could live to 140 as human lifespan increases, say scientists