Oct. 9, 2024 – For more than a century, steady increases in life expectancy sparked hope that humans may regularly live past the age of 100 someday.
But a new analysis now suggests that peak human longevity is well below that of becoming a centenarian. The findings, published this week in the journal Nature Aging, show that the best typical lifespan for most women will be around 90 years old and just under 85 years old for men.
Current U.S. life expectancy is 80 years old for women and 75 years old for men, according to the CDC.
The new predictions are based on data from the U.S. and Hong Kong, plus eight countries with long lifespans: Australia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.
“Most people alive today at older ages are living on time that was manufactured by medicine,” said lead author S. Jay Olshansky, PhD, a University of Illinois Chicago professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, in a news release. “But these medical Band-Aids are producing fewer years of life even though they’re occurring at an accelerated pace, implying that the period of rapid increases in life expectancy is now documented to be over.”
The study authors noted that it is possible that a major breakthrough in medicine or science could change the currently decelerating trajectory of life expectancy. The results of such a breakthrough would likely have to overcome the effects of aging.
Olshansky noted that extending life expectancy further could be harmful because the added years may not be healthy years.
“We should now shift our focus to efforts that slow aging and extend healthspan,” he said, meaning that focus should be on the number of healthy years lived.
The probability of living to age 100 is 5% for women and just under 2% for men, the new analysis showed. Hong Kong has the greatest likelihood of people living to 100 years old, where nearly 13% of women and more than 4% of men are predicted to become centenarians.
Among those who should consider the updated life expectancy predictions, the authors wrote, are “insurance companies and actuarial firms tasked with forecasting mortality improvement factors. These impact current carriers of life insurance and also the valuation of current and future insurance applicants’ policies.”
The authors concluded that “humanity’s battle for a long life has largely been accomplished.”
But, they added, what that longevity looks like may be drastically different in the future.
“Given rapid advances now occurring in geroscience, there is reason to be optimistic that a second longevity revolution is approaching in the form of modern efforts to slow biological aging, offering humanity a second chance at altering the course of human survival,” they wrote. “However, until it becomes possible to modulate the biological rate of aging and fundamentally alter the primary factors that drive human health and longevity, radical life extension in already long-lived national populations remains implausible in this century.”
