Humans may have hit the longevity ceiling

Humans may have hit the longevity ceiling:

World's oldest woman Jeanne Calment paased away at the age of 122 years

People may not get older than 115 years, says study.

On August 4, 1997, Jeanne Calment passed away in France. The Reaper comes for all of us but he was in no hurry for Mrs Calment. She died at age of 122, setting a record for human longevity.

People have been living to greater ages over the past few decades but now, researchers say, we have reached the upper limit of longevity. “It seems we have reached our ceiling,” said Jan Vijg, an expert on aging at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “From now on, humans will never get older than 115.”

Vijg and his students Xiao Dong and Brandon Milholland published the evidence for this prediction on Wednesday in the journal Nature. James Vaupel, the director of the Max-Planck Odense Centre on the Biodemography of Aging, rejected the suggestion that humans are approaching a life span limit.

A child born in the US in 1900 had an average life expectancy just short of 50 years. An American child born today can expect to live on average to age 79. Japan’s average life expectancy at birth has risen the most of any country so far, to 83 years. For the study, Vijg and his students charted how many people of varying ages were alive in a given year. Then they compared the figures from year to year, in order to calculate how fast the population grew at each age.

The fastest-growing portion of society has been old people, Vijg found. In France in the 1920s, for example, the fastest-growing group of women was the 85-yearolds. By the 1990s, the fastestgrowing group of Frenchwomen was the 102-year-olds. If that trend had continued, the fastestgrowing group today might well be the 110-year-olds.

Now, the increases have slowed down and appear to have stopped, Vijg found out from data from 40 countries. The shift towards growth in ever-older populations started slowing in the 1980s; about a decade ago, it stalled. This might have occurred because humans finally have hit an upper limit to their longevity.

To further test this possibility, the researchers analysed the International Database on Longevity, that contains reports on 534 people who have lived to extremely old age. In 1968, the oldest age attained was 111. By the 1990s, that figure increased to 115. But then this trend stopped, too. With exceptions like Mrs. Calment, no one has lived beyond 115 years. “You’d need 10,000 worlds like ours to have the chance that there would be one human who would become 125 years,” Vijg said.

Starting in the 19th century, average life expectancy started to rise because fewer children were dying. Some of those improvements have come from quitting smoking and having better diets. But all of the improvements, researchers argue, have not turned back the underlying biological process of aging.