Few people celebrate their 100th birthday.
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Will you live to be 100 years old? For the average person, the answer is probably no, because life expectancy growth has slowed in wealthy countries despite advances in medical care and living conditions. This suggests there may be a biological limit to our age, but some researchers believe further progress is possible.
The current slowdown is in sharp contrast to 20 years.th Over the past century, life expectancy at birth in wealthy areas has increased by three years per decade in what researchers call radical life extension. People born in the mid-1800s had a life expectancy of 20 to 50 years, but by the 1990s they had reached 50 to 70 years.
Extrapolating from this trend, some people at the time began predicting that newborns in the 21st century would typically live to be over 100 years old, but that point has now been reached and this may have been too optimistic. It seems so.
S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago and his colleagues analyzed mortality data from the 1990s to 2019 from nine wealthy countries, including the United States, Australia, and South Korea, and Hong Kong. The 2019 cutoff was aimed at avoiding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers found that life expectancy at birth increased by an average of 6.5 years over the study period. In the US, it reached 78.8 in 2019, while in Hong Kong it was 85.
However, from 2010 to 2019, the growth rate slowed in most countries compared to the past 20 years. The U.S. is in the worst position, perhaps because of the ongoing opioid crisis, Olshansky said. By contrast, only Hong Kong has seen an increase in life expectancy growth since 2010, but it is unclear what is causing this, he said. That may be because people have easier access to health care than in other areas, he says.
Based on historical trends, researchers predict that life expectancy at birth will never exceed 84 years for men and 90 years for women. They also calculate that only a small number of today’s newborns will live to be 100 years old.
The recent slowdown may be because the greatest advances in environmental and medical improvements were already achieved in the 1900s, and human aging is reaching its biological limits, Olshansky said. Yang Vizi of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York agrees. “There are certain biological limits that keep us from getting any older,” he says.
However, Gerry McCartney of the University of Glasgow in the UK says that the main reason for the slowdown in growth over the past decade is due to policies in many of the countries analyzed, which have led to cuts in social security and health services. states that it may be increasing poverty. Without these, life expectancy growth might not have slowed down, so with the right policies, life expectancy could continue to rise, he says.
In fact, Professor Michael Rose of the University of California, Irvine, believes there is no limit to the human lifespan. With the right investments in anti-aging research, he says, we could see another radical increase in life expectancy this century, at least in wealthy countries.
Olshansky said he was positive that life expectancy is still increasing despite the recent economic slowdown. “Of course we should celebrate the fact that we can live this long,” he says.
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