Is 50 the new 40? Could 80 be the new 60? There’s a lot of talk these days about aging, both in terms of staying healthier as you get older and about the ways one can live longer, full stop. (See also, people trying out everything from blood transfusions to intermittent fasting.) There’s also the argument that radically changing one’s diet can help you live well into a second century.
Is it premature to suggest that humans might soon have an average lifespan in the three digits? Maybe. Earlier this month, a team of researchers published a paper in the journal Nature Aging with the title “Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the twenty-first century.” As you might expect, it represents something of a metaphorical bucket of cold water poured on dreams of living much longer than humans are living now.
The researchers drew upon data on mortality and life expectancy from Australia, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States from 1990 to 2019. Their conclusion? “Our analysis suggests that survival to age 100 years is unlikely to exceed 15% for females and 5% for males, altogether suggesting that, unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century,” they wrote.
In comments made to the Associated Press, the study’s lead author — the University of Illinois-Chicago’s S. Jay Olshansky — sounded skeptical that life expectancies would increase significantly beyond where they currently are. “We’re squeezing less and less life out of these life-extending technologies,” Olshansky said. “And the reason is, aging gets in the way.”
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Seven lessons for those looking to eat better and live longerThat doesn’t mean that there aren’t some policy and lifestyle implications for the authors’ findings. “Accelerated population aging is already upon us; the absolute number of people reaching older ages continues to grow rapidly,” the authors wrote in their paper. That could lead to serious societal changes — even if the market for 150th birthday candles never quite develops.
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