Few people can celebrate their 100th birthday
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Will you live to be 100? For the average person, the answer is probably no, as life expectancy growth is slowing in the wealthiest countries, despite advances in health and living conditions. This suggests that there may be a biological limit to how old we can get, although some researchers believe that more advances are possible.
The current slowdown is a marked contrast to the 20thth century, during which average life expectancy at birth rose in the wealthiest regions by three years per decade in a period of what researchers call radical life extension. While people born in the mid-1800s could expect to live 20 to 50 years, by the 1990s, it had reached the 50s to 70s.
Extrapolating the trend, some people at the time began to predict that newborns in the 21st century regularly live beyond 100, but now that we have reached that point, it seems that this was too optimistic.
S. Jay Olshansky at the University of Illinois at Chicago and colleagues analyzed mortality data from 1990 to 2019 in nine wealthy countries, including the United States, Australia and South Korea, as well as Hong Kong. The 2019 cutoff was intended to avoid any effects of the covid-19 pandemic. The team found that average life expectancy at birth increased by 6.5 years in the study period, on average. In the United States, it reached 78.8 in 2019, while in Hong Kong he was 85.
But the rate of growth slowed down in most countries in the period from 2010 to 2019, compared to the previous two decades. The United States has fared the worst, perhaps because of the ongoing opioid crisis, Olshansky says. In contrast, Hong Kong was the only place to see an increase in the rate of life expectancy since 2010, but what drives this is not clear, he says. It could be because people gain better access to health care compared to others, he says.
Based on past trends, researchers predict that the average life expectancy at birth may never exceed 84 for men and 90 for women. They also calculate that only a minority of newborns today will live to be 100.
The recent slowdown could be because the greatest advances in improving our environment and health have already been achieved in the 1900s and humans are reaching a biological limit for aging, says Olshansky. Jan Vijg at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, thinks similarly. “There is some sort of biological limit that prevents us from aging,” he says.
Ma Gerry McCartney at the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, says that the slow growth in the last decade can be largely due to policies in many of the countries analyzed, which have led to cuts in social benefits and services health, and led poverty. Without these, life expectancy could not be slowed down, so with the right policies, life expectancy could continue to grow, he says.
In fact, Michael Rose at the University of California, Irvine, thinks that there is no limit to how long a person can live. With the right investment in anti-aging research, we can see the radical extension of life again this century, at least in the richest countries, he says.
Even with the recent slowdown, Olshansky says he is positive that life expectancy is still increasing. “We should, of course, celebrate the fact that we can live this long,” he says.
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