How long can humans really live?

Jeanne Calment, a French woman who died at the age of 12, sets the current record for the longest human life 21 years ago. No one has gone beyond Jeanne's age so far, a team of scientists studying the long-time Italians. concluded that humans have not yet reached our longest life span.

According to the New York Times, researchers created a database of 3836 Italians aged 105 between 2009 and 2015 and then analyzed the pace at which different groups of people were living. age were dying. In general, the death rate in humans begins at the age of infancy, decreases in the early years, goes back to the thirties and reaches the seventies and eighties. Yet, among the very old Italians, the death rate seems to have stopped increasing. In fact, the curve seemed to stabilize. "The Plateau Sinks Over Time", Kenneth W. Wachter, a co-author of the study and demographer at the University of California, Berkeley told The Times. "Mortality improvements even extend to these extreme ages," which means we have not yet reached our maximum lifespan.

The results of the study are at odds with a previous highly controversial study that suggested that humans reach a maximum age of 115 years. The researchers believe that mortality rates could flatten for several reasons: maybe the genetically fragile people die first, leaving behind a pool of living robustness. Or maybe, the very old live at such a slow pace at the cellular level that it becomes easier to repair the damage to their cells.

The study does not necessarily mean that people survive Jeanne Calment on a regular basis. Centenarians are still far more likely to die than someone in their nineties. And "the higher the ceiling is that records are successively broken, the harder it is to break it," said Tom Kirkwood, deputy dean of aging at Newcastle University

(via the New York Times )