Slowing growth in life expectancy means few people will live to 100

Will you live to be 100? For ordinary people, the answer is probably no, because despite advances in health care and living conditions, life expectancy growth is slowing in rich countries. This suggests there may be a biological limit to our lifespan, although some researchers believe further advances are possible.

The current slowdown contrasts sharply with the 20th century^th During this period, average life expectancy at birth in wealthier areas increased by three years per decade, a period that researchers call “radical lifespan extension.” The life expectancy of a person born in the mid-1800s was 20 to 50 years, but by the 1990s, life expectancy had reached 50 to 70 years.

Following this trend, some began predicting that 21st century newborns would typically live to be over 100 years old, but now that we’ve reached that point, that seems overly optimistic.

S.Jay Olshansky The professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and his colleagues analyzed mortality data from the 1990s to 2019 in nine wealthy countries, including the United States, Australia, South Korea and Hong Kong. The 2019 shutdown was to avoid the impact of the covid-19 pandemic. The team found that life expectancy at birth increased by an average of 6.5 years over the entire study period. In the United States, Reached 78.8 2019, in Hong Kong It was 85.

But growth rates slowed in most countries between 2010 and 2019 compared with the previous two decades. Olshansky said the U.S. fared the worst, likely because of the ongoing opioid crisis. By contrast, Hong Kong is the only place where the rate of life expectancy growth has increased since 2010, but the drivers are unclear, he said. That could be because people have better access to health care than elsewhere, he said.

Based on past trends, researchers predict that average life expectancy at birth may never exceed 84 years for men and 90 years for women. They also calculated that only a handful of newborns today live to be 100 years old.

Olshansky said the recent slowdown may be because the greatest progress in improving the environment and health care had been made in the 1900s, and humans were reaching the biological limits of aging. Jane Wiig The Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York has similar ideas. “There is some kind of biological limit that prevents us from getting older,” he said.

but Gerry McCartney Researchers at the University of Glasgow in the UK said the slowdown in growth over the past decade may be largely attributed to policies in many of the countries analyzed that led to cuts in social welfare and health services and increased poverty. Without these, life expectancy growth may not slow down, so if the policies are right, life expectancy may continue to rise, he said.

Actually, Michael Ross Researchers at the University of California, Irvine believe there is no limit to human lifespan. With the right investments in anti-aging research, he says, we could see significant increases in lifespan again this century, at least in rich countries.

Olshansky said it was positive that life expectancy was increasing despite the recent economic slowdown. “Of course we should celebrate that we’ve survived this long,” he said.