Research: The increase in life expectancy has slowed down dramatically

Life expectancy rose rapidly in the 20th century, but now this rise has slowed down significantly, news The Guardian. There has been a slowdown in the last thirty years.

According to the findings of a study focused on mortality data, reaching the age of one hundred requires not only better cancer, dementia and heart disease treatments, but also revolutionary new drugs that can slow down the aging process.

“If you’re planning retirement, it’s not necessarily a good idea to assume you’ll live to be a hundred years old”, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics Jay Olshansky says to The Guardian.

The 20th century’s dramatic increase in life expectancy led some researchers to predict that the majority of people born after the year 2000 would live to be 100 years old. However, Olshansky and his colleagues have estimated that people are about to reach their biological limit, which is about 85 years.

In his latest study, Olshansky delved into the national statistics of the United States and the nine other countries with the highest life expectancy. He studied data from 1990 to 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic began.

Data from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden and Spain showed that the increase in life expectancy had slowed dramatically, and life expectancy in the United States had reversed.

According to the study, girls born recently in those countries have a 5.3 percent chance of living to be 100 years old, while boys have a 1.8 percent chance.

According to Olshansky, in order to extend life expectancy, new treatments are needed that slow down aging, which is the most significant risk factor for many diseases. Research is already being done to slow down aging, and researchers have succeeded in finding a dozen drugs that have appeared to extend the lifespan of mice used as test animals.