125 years, we will not be able to live any longer, according to the results of a study published in the medical journal Nature. Life expectancy is increasing and thanks to advances in medicine, we are living longer and longer. But this limit is not extendable.
Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the United States analyzed medical data from the Human Mortality Database, which compiles population mortality figures from more than 40 countries.
If life expectancy has increased, it could not exceed a certain age. Indeed, when scientists looked at people living 110 years or older, between 1968 and 2006 in the four industrialized countries (United States, France, Japan and United Kingdom), they discovered that the maximum age of deaths had increased rapidly between 1970 and 1990 before reaching a plateau in 1995. After that date the maximum age of death began to decline slightly, to the order of 0.38 years each year between 1995 and 2006.
The super centenarians will not exceed 115 years
They observed that the age of death of “super centenarians” is most often around 115 years old and they calculated 125 years as the absolute limit of human lifespan. But the probability of seeing a person live to this old age is less than 1 in 10,000.
“Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of human beings is fixed and subject to natural constraints,” explains Dr. Jan Vijg, author of the study.
These conclusions confirm the results of a French study by researchers from the Institute for Biomedical Research and Sports Epidemiology (Irmes). They published a study which revealed in the medical journal Journal of Gerontology, that life expectancy does not evolve linearly, but reaches a ceiling. This specificity observed among top athletes (who live longer) and “super-centenarians” reinforces the hypothesis that the ceiling for life expectancy is limited.
“Further progress in the fight against infectious and chronic diseases could further increase the average life expectancy of the population but not the maximum length of life,” says Dr Vijg.
Read also:
The best recipe to live 115 years
Longevity would not be genetic
A few minutes of sport to increase your life expectancy
