Advancements in science and medicine have helped people live longer and longer over the last several hundred years, but new research published this week in the journal Nature suggests that no matter what we do, it is unlikely that most people will make it past the age of 115.
According to CBS News, medical breakthroughs have not only vastly improved our life expectancy, but records of the oldest people have also steadily increased over that time, leading to speculation that humans don’t have a “maximum age”. Could we live to 150, 200, 300 years old or longer?
Unfortunately not, say Dr. Jan Vijg, a professor and chair of genetics of at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and his colleagues. By analyzing demographic data from around the world, they found that “improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100” and that “the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints.”
To support their argument, they note that the age of the oldest person to ever live has not risen since 1997, when a French woman named Jeanne Calment died at the age of 122. Based on the results of the new study, her record will likely not be broken anytime soon, Live Science noted. In fact, the study authors told BBC News that the odds of finding one person who reached the age of 125 were so poor you’d have to search on 10,000 planet Earths just to find one.
‘Almost impossible’ that most people will make it past 115
Vijg and his colleagues analyzed data from the Human Mortality Database, which includes age-related information from countries all over the world. They found that in at least 40 nations and territories, the number of people living to the age of 70 has increased since 1900, indicating that the overall life expectancy of the average person has gone up over the past 100-plus years.
That being said, the researchers speculated that if there was no maximum age, then most of the increases in survival rate should have involved men and women who were the oldest, Live Science explained. The data showed otherwise, however. In fact, survival rates among those in the oldest age groups have remained stagnant since 1980, suggesting that there may be a natural limit to how long a person can live.
The study authors also examined how old the longest-lived people were when they died, with a focus on deaths occurring in the US, UK, France, and Japan between 1968 and 2006. Those four nations, Live Science explained, contained the largest number of people who lived to the age of 110. They found that since Calment’s death in 1997, the maximum reported age of death has not increased, and has, in fact, slightly decreased over the decades since then.
“In people over 105 we make very little progress, that tells you we are most likely approaching the limit to human life,” Vijg told BBC News. “For the first time in history we’ve been able to see this, it looks like the maximum life span – this ceiling, this barrier – is about 115. It’s almost impossible you’ll get beyond it.”
“Based on the data we have now, the chance that you will ever see a person of 125 [years] in a given year is about 1 in 10,000,” he added in an interview with The Guardian. In light of the new findings, Vijg said that people should focus not on trying to live longer, but on enjoying the time they have and staying healthy. “That’s where we have to invest our money,” he concluded.
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Image credit: Dmitry Berkut/Thinkstock
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