Increase in human life expectancy, which nearly doubled over the last century, may be slowing, according to a new study. While advances in medicine, diet, and public health have helped people live longer, the researchers say that living beyond 100 may be farther off than many experts had hoped. “But these medical Band-Aids are producing fewer years of life even though they’re occurring at an accelerated pace.
” This is because while people are now prevented from dying from infectious diseases, they are now succumbing to age-related diseases that occur from biological aging. “Unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century,” the authors wrote in their study. Dr.
Nir Barzilai, who is a world-renowned leader in geroscience (the study of biological aging and age-related diseases), disagreed with the study’s conclusion, noting that while the statistical ceiling for human lifespan may be around 100, the biological ceiling is 115 years. Although life expectancy continues to rise, the pace of improvement has slowed. In 1990, the average amount of improvement in high-income countries was about 2.
5 years per decade. In the 2010s, it was 1.5 years.
This represents a significant deceleration compared to earlier periods. Women continue to outlive men. Life expectancy is the average number of years a newborn is expected to live, assuming current death rates remain unchanged.
While this measure is crucia.