Thanks to modern medicine, the average life expectancy has been going up. But it seems like it’s reached its limit, and the highest it’s going is 115 years.
With exponentially improving technology, and equally impressive advances in medicine, humans have facilitated a rising life expectancy for decades.
We seem to have reached our limit, according to a new American study that claims the maximum lifespan for most people may be around 115. This is simply based on the innate limits of the modern human body, says the report.
While there are a few individuals who’ve broken the 115 plateau, they’re rare exceptions, says Jan Vijg of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
Sifting through demographic records, Vijg’s research team discovered the maximum lifespan hasn’t elevated in conjunction with the average lifespan. The record for the oldest living person was that magic 115 in the 1990s, where it plateaued. In other words, though the average life expectancy improves with medicine and technology, the actual maximum of the years we can live has been relatively stagnant.
Jeanne Calment, a French supercentenarian who has the longest confirmed human lifespan on record, reached 122 before she died in 1997. But again, this is an exception, and no one has come close to her age in two decades. This is actually more evidence that we’re not seeing more and more people living past 100, never mind 115, despite improved – average – life expectancy.
“115 is like a borderline – you can’t cross that unless you’re an exceptional individual,” Vijg said.
More than a century’s worth of records and data from the four countries with the most people over 110 were analyzed – the UK, US, Japan, and France.
Though a tremendous amount of data was seemingly dissected, there are still naysayers to the ‘limit on human life’ claim.
James Vaupel of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, says predictions about lifespan limits are pointless; they’ve been proven wrong, with the ‘record’ broken time and time again.
“It is disheartening how many times the same mistake can be made,” he said.
Tom Kirkwood of Newcastle University, UK, also doesn’t buy limits on human life.
“The idea does not really fit what we already know about the biology of the ageing process. There is no set programme for ageing – the process is driven by the build-up of faults and damage in the cells and organs of the body, which is malleable.”
Photo Credit: Anansing/Shutterstock
