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Living longer than 100 years old�is implausible before 2100, scientists say
What’s the best part of old age? That it doesn’t last very long.
Despite entering what one group of scientists from China hails as a new age of aging research, another from across the US says extending our lifespans far beyond current limits is implausible. Does that mean I wont live to be 105 after all?
Scientists check hopes for longevity increases in line with 20th-century trends
In the 20th century, human life expectancy went up by about 30 years depending on the country, and an individual’s circumstances, etc.�
Researchers studied the data from countries with the longest-living populations (Australia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland), as well as Hong Kong and the US, to get to grips with more recent developments relating to life expectancy.
Bad news, I’m afraid. In a word, the graph is tapering off.
They estimate that the maximum percentage of people who live to exceed the age of 100 will be 15% for women and 5% for men.
So, the trends will not continue. They have not been continuing. And unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, for example by some unpredictable medical breakthrough, radical human life extension is implausible in this century.
The researchers published their work in Nature in October 2024.
Blue Zone regions of exceptional lifespans debunked by award-winning researcher
Dr Saul Justin Newman won the Ig Nobel Prize this year designed to award research that makes people laugh, and then think.
His work does just that.
He found fundamental flaws in the existing research into old-age demographics. So-called Blue Zones, where people live to inexplicably old ages, may be hotbeds of pension fraud and faulty vital registration rather than oases of hyper-fertile soil and zen-like tranquility.�The examples he mentions are Sardinia (Italy), Okinawa (Japan), and Ikaria (Greece).
The new predictors of remarkable longevity and supercentenarian status, he writes in his research paper, are& the absence of accurate registration of vital events such as birth and death, poverty, low income, shorter life expectancy, higher crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, and bizarrely, fewer people over the age of 90.
If this strikes you as odd, its because it is.�Crime, bad health, and low socioeconomic status are not, in fact, reliable indicators of longevity. The fact that the statistics make it look like they are means the statistics are wrong, according to Dr Newman.
By introducing birth certificates, individual US states saw a 70-80% fall in the number of extremely old people. Or rather, the number of people who claimed they were extremely old. It got rid of fraud.
Fewer than 1 in 5 of people who claim to be over 110 years of age have a birth certificate, making it very difficult, or even impossible, to exhaustively validate their date of birth. Given that a disproportionate number of the world’s extremely old people come from deprived areas with shorter life expectancy, there appears to be a spanner in the works, somewhere…
