After 105 years, life has no end

The problem is only to get there; once you have crossed the finish line "there are no more problems". We are talking about the maximum age to reach after which the risk of death stabilizes and remains constant and becomes almost impossible to stabilize when the life of a human being ends. The problem is to get there precisely because this threshold is 105 years old. This is demonstrated for the first time by an Italian research published in Science and conducted by the University Sapienza of Rome, in collaboration with those of Roma Tre, Berkeley and Southern Denmark and the 39 ; Istat.

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"If there is a biological limit to human life, it is not yet visible or has not been achieved," said the research coordinator , Elisabetta Barbi from the Department of Statistics of La Sapienza. For some time now, the scientific community has been wondering if and how the risk of dying would change with age. Some argue that the mortality risk curve continues to increase exponentially with age, and those who are confident that it will decelerate and then reach a steady level at older ages.

But to answer these questions, it is necessary to accurately estimate the mortality risk of ultracentrenarians, which has not been possible so far due to the lack of reliable data. On the other hand, Italian researchers have been able to rely on the data of nearly 4,000 Italians in a hundred years (most of them women), collected between 2009 and 2015. They were able to verify that " the risk of death accelerates exponentially with age until age 80, then decelerates gradually until it reaches a plateau and remains constant, or almost, after 105 years, "he added. .

Another interesting fact emerging from the research is that " for younger generations, mortality levels are slightly lower ," said Barbi. Combined with the growth of supercentenarians in recent years, this indicates an increase in human longevity over time. A similar pattern of mortality at the most extreme ages has also been observed in other animal species, such as insects and worms, suggesting that there is a common explanation from the point of view of the 39; evolution.

according to Barbi, "not only gives a clear and certain answer on mortality curves, but is crucial for understanding the underlying mechanisms of human longevity, and future developments of theories on aging". This is a first "confirmation – he concludes – of the role played by selective survival, that is, the fact that those who are less vulnerable and vulnerable to disease and death survive."