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New research has revived one of the oldest and biologically fundamental debates in the life sciences: Is there a fixed limit to how long the humans can live?

The study, published in the journal Science suggests that perhaps there is none. (It should be noted that this finding contradicts other similar research done by biologists and demographers, as noted Nature .)

Researchers examined a population of nearly 4,000 Italians 105 years old or older. What they found, is that the mortality risk is essentially flat after a certain point for these "super-aged" individuals. The risk of death increases gradually as one gets older, especially at the age of 80 and 90 years. But, according to Elisabetta Barbi, from Sapienza University, and Francesco Lagona, from the University of Roma Tre, after reaching the age of 105, the chances of dying the following year fall to 50% and remain stable

. of their dataset, claiming that their 'estimates are free of aggregation artifacts that have limited previous studies and provide the best evidence to date of the existence of extreme mortality plateaus in If a mortality plateau really occurs, it means theoretically that death does not have to be inevitable.

Not all scientists have reached this conclusion. For example, a team from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York badyzed the age of the world's oldest people and established the maximum duration of human longevity between 115 and 125 years. (For the curious: The oldest person ever recorded in history was a French lady named Jeanne Calment, who died at age 122 in 1997.)

"[B] badyzing global demographic data, we show that improvements in survival with age tend to decrease after the age of 100, and that the age at death of the oldest person in the world has not increased since the 1990s. Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints, "wrote Albert Einstein researchers in their 2016 report.

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