Oct. 9, 2024 – For greater than a century, the regular increase in life expectancy raised hopes that individuals could sooner or later commonly live beyond 100 years.
But a brand new evaluation now suggests that the utmost life expectancy of a human being is significantly lower than that of a centenarian. The findings, published this week within the journal Aging in natureshow that one of the best typical life expectancy for most girls is around 90 years and for men it is nearly 85 years.
Current life expectancy within the United States is 80 years for girls and 75 years for men, in line with the study CDC.
The latest predictions are based on data from the United States and Hong Kong, in addition to eight long-life countries: Australia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
“Most people living to older ages today are living off the time created by medicine,” said lead creator S. Jay Olshansky, PhD, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics on the University of Illinois Chicago, in a Press release. “But these medical patches are shortening life expectancy, even though they are occurring at an accelerated pace, meaning the period of rapid increases in life expectancy is now demonstrably over.”
The study authors noted that it is feasible that a serious breakthrough in medicine or science could change the present declining trajectory of life expectancy. The results of such a breakthrough would likely must overcome the consequences of aging.
Olshansky noted that further extending life expectancy might be harmful because the extra years is probably not healthy years.
“We should now shift our focus to efforts that slow aging and prolong health,” he said, suggesting that the main target needs to be on the variety of healthy years lived.
The probability of living to 100 is 5 percent for girls and slightly below 2 percent for men, the brand new evaluation found. People are most probably to live to 100 in Hong Kong, where estimates suggest nearly 13% of ladies and greater than 4% of men will live to be centenarians.
Those who should consider the updated life expectancy projections, the authors write, include “insurance companies and actuarial firms whose mission is to predict factors that improve mortality.” These impact current life insurance carriers and likewise current policy valuations and future insurance applicants.”
The authors concluded that “humanity’s struggle for longevity is largely over.”
However, they added that the way in which that longevity looks could change drastically in the longer term.
“Given the rapid advances in geroscience, there is reason to hope that a second longevity revolution is on the horizon in the form of modern efforts to slow biological aging, offering humanity a second chance to change the course of human survival,” they wrote. “However, unless it becomes possible to modulate the biological rate of aging and fundamentally alter the primary factors that determine human health and longevity, radical life extension in already long-lived national populations remains unlikely this century.”