HQ Team
October 8, 2024:Humanity is hitting the upper limit of life expectancy, according to a new study.
Medical advances have led to an increase in human longevity, but a recent study says that this life expectancy may have plateaued as it found shrinking longevity increases in countries with the longest-living populations.
“We have to recognize there’s a limit” and perhaps reassess assumptions about when people should retire and how much money they’ll need to live out their lives, said S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois-Chicago researcher who was lead author of the study published Monday by the journal Nature Aging.
Life expectancy
Life expectancy is a statistical measure that estimates the average number of additional years a person of a specific age can expect to live. The most commonly referenced metric is life expectancy at birth, which reflects the average lifespan of newborns assuming that current age-specific mortality rates remain constant throughout their lives. Also, it is not a perfect measurement as it does not take into account deadly disasters, epidemics, or a miracle cure that might kill or save millions of people.
Global trends
Over the last two centuries, life expectancy has dramatically increased worldwide. For example, it rose from about 32 years in 1900 to over 70 years by 2021. For most of the 20th century, each successive decade added about three extra years to people’s average lifespan in developed countries.
This increase is attributed to advancements in medicine, public health initiatives, improved nutrition, and reductions in child mortality rates
Study model
For the study, Olshansky and his team tracked life expectancy estimates for the years 1990 to 2019 from countries with the longest lif expectancy, viz Australia, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Switzerland. The database was drawn from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.
The United States, which does not figure anywhere near the top 20 countries was still included as the researchers wanted to include their home country and the belief that life expectancy in the U.S. might surge dramatically in this century.
Longevity
The research revealed that women continue to live longer than men, but their life expectancy are slowing pace. In 1990, the average improvement was about 2 1/2 years per decade. In the 2010s, it was 1 1/2 years — and almost zero in the U.S.
In 2019, a little over 2% of Americans made it to 100, compared with about 5% in Japan and 9% in Hong Kong, Olshansky said.
The research team found that life expectancy faced a lot of roadblocks in the U.S. due to a large number of people being killed before they reach old age due to socio-economic problems, including drug overdoses, shootings, obesity and inadequate and inequitable healthcare access.
Interestingly, the researchers also said that if in all the places where people lived longest deaths before age 50 were eliminated, there would be only a 1 1/2 years increase in life expectancy.
Talking about the plateauing of life expectancy, Olshansky said, “We’re squeezing less and less life out of these life-extending technologies. And the reason is, ageing gets in the way,” he said.
“Our bodies don’t operate well when you push them beyond their warranty period. As people live longer, it’s like playing a game of Whac-a-Mole,” he adds. “Each mole represents a different disease, and the longer people live, the more moles come up and the faster they come up.”
Population growth may show an increase in the number of centenarians, but the percentage of people hitting 100 will remain limited, likely with fewer than 15% of women and 5% of men making it that long in most countries, Olshansky said.
