I CAME across an interesting and somewhat amusing article the other day, which suggests that our lifespan has already hit its natural limit.
So basically although more people reach old-age each year, the ceiling for human lifespan appears to be stuck at around 115 years! Humans, say researchers, are unlikely to ever blow out more than 125 candles on their birthday cake.
The oldest human who ever lived, according to official records, was 122-year-old French woman Jeanne Louise Calment, who died in 1997.
Now, a team of American researchers says Calment is unlikely to lose the top spot.
“The chances are very high that we (have) really reached our maximum allotted lifespan for the first time,” says Jan Vijg, co-author of the research from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
People, he says, should focus on enjoying life and staying healthy for as long as possible. “That’s where we have to invest our money,” adds Vijg.
The notion of extending the human lifespan has captured imaginations for millennia. Among scientists, enthusiasm for the idea has grown in recent years with a host of Silicon Valley companies springing up to join academic institutions in attempting to chip away at issue of longevity, among them Google’s California Life Company, or Calico, as it is known.
But researchers, writing in the journal Nature, describe how analysis of records from a number of international databases suggests there is a limit to human lifespan and that we have already hit it.
Using data of 41 countries and territories from the Human Mortality Database, the team found that life expectancy at birth has increased over the last century.
That, says Vijg, is down to a number of factors, including advances in childbirth and maternity care, clean water, the development of antibiotics and vaccines and other health measures.
But while the proportion of people surviving to 70 and over has risen since 1900, the rate of improvements in survival differs greatly between levels of old age.
Large gains are seen for ages 70 and up, but for ages 100 or more the rate of improvement drops rapidly.
What’s more, in 88 per cent of the countries, the ages showing the greatest rate of improvement have not changed since 1980.
The researchers then turned to the International Database on Longevity and analysed data from France, the UK, the US and Japan. The four countries with a high proportion of those aged 110 or above... the so-called ‘supercentenarians.’
The researchers found that the maximum reported age at death rapidly increased between 1970 and the early 1990s, rising by around 0.15 years every year. But in the mid-to-late 90s, a plateau was reached, with the yearly maximum reported age at death at around 115 years. “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,” says Vijg.
The apparent limit to human lifespan, the authors say, is not down to a set of biological processes specifically acting to call time on life. Rather, it is a by-product of a range of genetic programmes that control processes such as growth and development. “You get people who are vegan, sleep 10 hours a day, have a low-stress job and still end up dying young,” says biostatistician Steve Horvath.
A higher biological age, regardless of actual age, was consistently linked to an earlier death, the study found. Scientists found that known health indicators, such as smoking, blood pressure and weight, were still more valuable in predicting life expectancy in the 2,700 participants who had died since the study began, but that their underlying ageing rate also had a significant effect.
So we are to live until about 115... Isn’t there a saying that goes something like... it’s not about the years in your life; it’s about the life in your years?! I am not so sure that the years are important to me more so than making sure these years are lived well with health and ability!