Lifespan|When life expectancy increased drastically, it was expected that the children of the 21st century would live to be a hundred years old. That’s not happening.
The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
The increase in life expectancy has slowed down, and most children born now do not live to be a hundred years old.
Researcher Jay Olhansky from the University of Illinois estimates that life expectancy stops at 85 years.
The opioid crisis, diabetes and heart disease have reduced life expectancy in the United States.
Hong Kong girls now have the best chance of reaching the age of one hundred.
A lifetime lengthening has frozen, and not many of the children born now will live to be a hundred years old, says a study published in the journal Nature Aging researchwhich looked at developments over the past 30 years in some of the world’s longest-lived nations.
“There is a limit to how far a person’s survival can be stretched. When you live to be old enough, biological aging will occur,” says the first author of the research report Jay Olhansky from the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA.
Last century, life expectancy grew rapidly. First, child mortality was radically reduced, then middle-aged mortality. Finally, the lives of the elderly also began to lengthen.
In different parts of the world and in different population groups, development took place at different rates, but overall the pace was amazing. Based on that, it was calculated that most children of the 21st century could live to be a hundred years old and beyond.
However, Olhansky already proposed in 1990 that human life will not increase much anymore, but that the average life expectancy will stop at 85 years.
According to his calculations, there are no more additional years to be gained by public health work and medicine, when biological aging starts to constitute the main risk of death.
“Now we have evidence that our hypothesis was correct,” says Olhansky In the journal Nature.
As evidence, he uses death statistics from ten countries: France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Australia and the United States.
The figures showed that life expectancy continued to grow between 2010 and 2019, but more slowly than in 1990–2000 and much more slowly than in optimistic forecasts.
In the United States, a research group found a decline in life expectancy that began in the last decade, which Olhansky describes as shocking.
The reason appears to be the opioid crisis as well as diabetes and heart disease, which have started to kill people aged 40-60.
Hongkong was the only one of the studied countries where life expectancy increased more than in previous decades.
Hong Kong girls also have the best seams to reach the age of a hundred years. According to the study, 12.8 percent have a chance.
All in all, children born after 2010 have a very small chance of living to be a hundred years old. The chance for women is 5.1 percent and for men 1.8 percent.
According to the group’s calculations, only the invention and widespread use of antiaging treatments could speed up life expectancy so that more than 15 percent of women and 5 percent of men could reach the age of over a hundred years.
The group points out that life expectancy in poor countries can still increase significantly. They can afford to improve.
Demographer Dmitri Jdanov from the German Max Planck Institute considers Olhansky’s group’s view of the human upper limit to be unnecessarily pessimistic in a comment published by Nature.
“A new leap can be difficult to take, but the rapid development of new technologies can lead to an unexpected revolution,” he says.
However, Olhansky’s group writes that their conclusion is not pessimistic, but rather that the result of the study emphasizes the success of medicine and public health work: in a hundred years, humanity has gained the upper hand over diseases that previously shortened human life.