According to scientists, we haven’t reached the upper limit of our lifespans yet.
The current record for the longest living human was set 21 years ago by Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman who died at the age of 122. While no one has surpassed Jeanne’s age to date, a team of scientists studied long-living Italians and concluded that humans have not reached our longest possible lifespan yet.
According to the New York Times, researchers created a database of 3,836 elderly Italians who had reached the age of 105 between 2009 and 2015, then analyzed the rate at which the various age groups were dying.
Typically, human death rate starts high in infancy, falls during early years, climbing again in people’s thirties and shooting up in people’s seventies and eighties. Yet among the very-old Italians, the death rate appeared to have stopped rising. In fact, the curve seemed to plateau. “The plateau is sinking over time,” Kenneth W. Wachter, a co-author of the study and demographer at the University of California, Berkeley told the Times. “Improvements in mortality extend even to these extreme age,” which means we haven’t reached our maximum lifespan just yet.
The study’s findings are a contradiction to a previous, much debated study which suggested humans live to a maximum age of 115. Researchers speculate that death rates might flatten out for a number of reasons: perhaps, those who are frail genetically tend to die first, leaving behind a pool of the robustly alive. Or perhaps, the very old are living at such a slower rate at the cellular level that it becomes easier to repair damage to their cells.
The study doesn’t necessarily mean that people will be outliving Jeanne Calment on
a regular basis.
Centenarians still have a much higher chance of dying than someone in their nineties. And “the higher the ceiling gets set as records are successively broken, the harder it gets to break it,” said Tom Kirkwood, associate dean for aging at Newcastle University.
(Read full article via The New York Times)