They say that by 2060 life expectancy will be a record high

In 1997, a the claimed age of 122 yearsJeanne Calment died in the south of France, setting a benchmark for human survival.

While there is no full certainty of the document’s authenticity, Calment’s presumed age at death is now a rough indicator of a possible human life span.

Of the few dozen people who are currently over 110, the odds of any of them turning 125 they are little or nothing.

A little more optimistic are economist David McCarthy of the University of Georgia and Po-Lin Wang, an expert in risk management and insurance at the University of South Florida in the United States. They think youA real record could be just around the corner.

Although there are now more centenarians than ever before in history, the edge of survival seems stuck in the 11th decade and it has been since the last century.

McCarthy and Wang used mortality data from birth cohorts in the Human Mortality Database, using a Bayesian statistical approach to analyze life expectancy of newborns in the same year in 19 industrialized countries.

Since the number of people who live to such an old age is quite small statistically, the duo applied a function known as the Gompertz-Makeham law of mortality to better estimate the age at which each individual might be expected to first reach a putative mortality plateau.

This “Gompertz Maximum Age”, or GMA, theoretically it should suggest an upper limit for human life. If the GMA is fairly constant across cohorts, we can assume that there is a maximum age.

Advances in medical science could help more people avoid disease and recover from injury, but the distribution of ages at which we die simply will be reduced to a smaller range.

On the other hand, if GMA were found to increase across cohorts, there might be reason to suspect so mortality is “deferred”.which means that if there is a lifespan limit programmed into our biology, we have yet to see it kick into action.

For the most part throughout history, it looks like GMA has remained relatively stable. Improvements in sanitation, health care and nutrition have enabled more people to live to old age, compressing the mortality distribution beyond a certain point rather than extending it.

However, there were different periodss where this was not the case.

One was among people born in the decades after the mid-19th century where the GMA jumped by about five years. Even if the cause is not clear, the increase was more pronounced among women.

It also describes to people who reached their centennial before 1980, making possible accountability for significant improvements in medical technology and public health measures.

A much more significant jump in GMA appears to occur among the People born between 1910 and 1950. Currently, with ages between 70 and 110 years, we could expect a lag in mortality of about 10 years.

The trends could also help explain why records appear to have stabilized over the past few decades. Social changes leading to deferred mortality may not affect all cohorts equally, meaning those large enough to have broken longevity records he may be too old to benefit from it of measures involving a subsequent postponement.

In the context of other studies, medical advances and access to social care may allow some of our descendants add decades to our lives.

But it is not yet to invest in the birthday candle business. The results of the study, published in PLOS ONE. are based on numerous hypotheses and speculationsone of which is the relationship between medical care and a possible postponement of mortality.

“We also emphasize that cohorts born before 1950 will only have the potential to do so breaking existing longevity records if policy choices continue to support the health and well-being of older adults and the political, environmental and economic environment remains stable,” the researchers note.

Far from being a reason for hope, the study could serve as a warning. Not only could we have more people reaching old age, forced to face the challenges that old age brings, a slowdown in population growth means less support from a younger community.

As seen in the pandemic’s devastating impact on older people, the company may not be ready for a record life expectancy.

Source: Scientific Advisory