How long can humans live? We may not have hit the limit yet

Human life expectancy has continued to increase for decades in most countries, but the record for the longest life has not.

Using a new method of analyzing mortality records, figures for 19 high-income countries suggest that the maximum human lifespan is not yet approached and records may begin to rise in the coming decades. I’m here. “At the moment, it doesn’t look like we’re nearing the upper limit,” said the study’s lead investigator, David McCarthy of the University of Georgia, Athens.

The longest living person in history is recorded as Jeanne Calment, who died at the age of 122, but questions have recently arisen about her authenticity.

Since Calment’s death in 1997, the oldest record has been held by people between the ages of 110 and 120. This has led scientists such as Albert Heinstein School of Medicine in New York Jan Vijg to conclude that there is probably a biological limit to the maximum human lifespan, estimating it at about 115 years.

However, the latest findings suggest that maximum human life expectancy soon begins to increase as people born in the first decades of the 20th century reach very old age.

McCarthy’s team came to this conclusion after examining people’s ages at death in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, in addition to various European countries. This was taken from the Human Mortality Database, a record of global birth and death statistics.

Researchers looked at the age at death of a group of people born in the same year. Most previous studies grouped people based on the year they died, which consolidates people with different lifespans and can blur trends, says McCarthy. .

When analyzed by birth year, the risk of dying in a particular year increased with increasing age in the group born after about 1910, but not as much as in the group born before that. suggests that the world record for longest life expectancy will increase in the coming decades as the surviving members of the .

For example, a person born in 1910 may only reach 120 in 2030, so he has not yet had a chance to reach 120.

People in these birth cohorts have benefited from medical advances since the end of World War II, says McCarthy. .

But Vijg says the analysis is hypothetical. That is, the assumption is that the annual mortality risk, which rises exponentially with age for most of our lives, begins to plateau when people reach about 105 years of age. This assumption is not universally accepted, he says. he says.

However, Karle Christensen of the University of Southern Denmark says that this assumption is well supported by previous research. “A lot of these projects rely on models that predict what will happen in the future,” he says. “Nobody knows the truth”