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The increase in life expectancy slows down dramatically

Politiko 2024-10-08 09:21:18

An analysis of death data from the world's longest-lived populations reveals that the rapid improvements in life expectancy achieved in the 20th century have slowed dramatically in the past three decades.

The discovery suggests that if 100 was once an attainable age now 80 is the new attainable age as radical new drugs that slow the aging process itself are needed, rather than better treatments for common killers such as cancer, dementia and heart diseases.

According to the study, children born recently in regions with older people are less likely to become centenarians. At best, researchers predict that 15% of women and 5% of men in older residential areas will reach 100 this century.

Advances in public health and medicine sparked a life expectancy revolution in the 20th century. In the previous 2,000 years, life expectancy rose, on average, by a year every century or two. In the 20th century, life expectancy increased, with people gaining an extra three years every decade.

The period of radical life extension has led some researchers to study this trend and suggest that most people born after 2000 will live to be 100 years old. But the perspective was challenged in 1990 by Olshansky and his colleagues, who argued that humans were reaching a biological ceiling of about 85 years.

For the latest study, Olshansky tapped into national statistics from the US and nine regions with the highest life expectancies, focusing on the years 1990 to 2019, before the Covid pandemic hit. Data from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden and Spain showed that life expectancy growth had slowed dramatically. In the US, life expectancy fell.

Writing in Nature Aging, the researchers describe how, on average, life expectancy in the longest-lived regions increased by just 6.5 years between 1990 and 2019. They predict that recently born girls in the regions have only a 5.3% chance of reaching age 100 while boys have a 1.8% chance.

Olshansky said radical new treatments that slow aging, the biggest risk factor for many diseases, would be needed to achieve another longevity revolution. Field research is underway with a dozen or so drugs that show they increase the lifespan of mice.

In 2000, Steven Austad, a professor of healthy aging at the University of Birmingham in Alabama, bet Olshansky that the first person to live to 150 had already been born. Thanks to compound interest, by the time the bet is settled, the winner or his successors will have won millions of dollars.

The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that life expectancy at birth in the UK from 2020 to 2022 was 82.6 years for women and 78.6 for men, which is back to 2010-2012 levels for women and below that level for men.