Study says human age limit reached

Research released this week suggests that human lifespan expectancy has reached its limit. Scientists lead by Xiao Dong, Brandon Milholland, and Jan Vijg have concluded that improvements in survival with age "tend to decline after age 100." These researchers have concluded that maximum lifespan of humans "is fixed and subject to natural constraints." Sorry, Ricky Bobby. You're not going to live to be 245 or 300 years old.

Using population data for more than 40 countries around the world, these researchers have shown that those countries have been having a decline in late-life mortality since the 1990s.

Survival improvements since the 1990s for people age 100 and up, meanwhile, seem to peak – peak at around age 100, that is to say. Diminishing gains, dropping life.

Image above: "Professor X" from upcoming film "Logan", captured by James Mangold, via Twitter, "Taken w/ Leica S 007 Summicron 100mm, ISO 3200 1/250 ƒ3.4"

In the 2006 film "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," race car driver Ricky Bobby suggests, "Oh, I'm not stupid, Lucius. No one lives forever. No one. But with advances in modern science, and my high level of income, I mean, it's not crazy to think I can't live to be 245, maybe 300. Heck, I just read in the newspaper that they put a pig heart in some guy from Russia."

It's not as if attempting to save people's lives might not possibly lead to a person living longer than the maximum age these scientists suggest. Maybe. But chances are, they're right, and humans cannot live beyond 125 years. Total. No matter what.

"Demographers as well as biologists have contended there is no reason to think that the ongoing increase in maximum lifespan will end soon," said Jan Vijg, Ph.D., professor and chair of genetics, the Lola and Saul Kramer Chair in Molecular Genetics, and professor of ophthalmology & visual sciences at Einstein.

Vijg is senior author on the paper published on age this week. "Our data," continued Dr. Vijg, "strongly suggests that [maximum lifespan] already has been attained and that this happened in the 1990s."

The International Database on Longevity was used by this team to find "maximum reported age of death" for people verified as living at least to the age of 110 between the years 1968 and 2006. They also limited their search to the four countries with the largest group of longest-living humans.

Between 1968 and the early 1990s, age at death continued to increase. In the year 1997, the still-oldest-person to ever live (ever documented, that is), died at age 122. She was Jeanne Calment and she lived in France.

Facts / Conclusions before and as a result of this study:

• USA lifespan expectancy in 1900: 47

• USA current lifespan expectancy: 79

• Average maximum human lifespan today: 115

• Oldest living human: Jeanne Calment, died in 1997 at age 122

• Absolute maximum human lifespan: 125

• Probability of person living to absolute max lifespan: 1 in 10,000

"Further progress against infectious and chronic diseases may continue boosting average life expectancy, but not maximum lifespan," said Dr. Vijg.

"While it's conceivable that therapeutic breakthroughs might extend human longevity beyond the limits we've calculated, such advances would need to overwhelm the many genetic variants that appear to collectively determine the human lifespan."

Dr. Vijg also offered a suggestion to those individuals and groups working now to increase lifespan beyond any we've yet seen in humans. "Perhaps resources now being spent to increase lifespan," said Dr. Vijg, "should instead go to lengthening healthspan—the duration of old age spent in good health."

For more information, see the paper "Evidence for a limit to human lifespan" as published in the scientific journal Nature under code doi:10.1038/nature19793 by Xiao Dong, Brandon Milholland, and Jan Vijg.