Study suggests that there is no limit to longevity, but becoming super old is still difficult Smart News

Something miraculous happened during the twentieth century, with technological leaps such as aircraft, television, radio, atomic bomb and Internet: thanks to the improvement of public health, medicines and nutrition, the average lifespan on Earth has doubled. The big question now is whether it could double again. Is there a natural biological limit to human longevity, an age we can not cross? Or, given the right circumstances, could a lucky human give Methuselah a run for his money? Ben Guarino at The Washington Post reports that a new study on very old Italians suggests that there is no limit on the life of a person. human in this mortal spiral.

The science of longevity is surprisingly controversial, mainly because there are so few people of advanced age – defined at 110 or older – around the study. Researchers are turning to statistics to try to determine how long people can live. Guarino reports that in 1825, the actuary Benjamin Gompertz put forward the idea that the chances of dying increase exponentially with age. Other research proves it. Between the ages of 30 and 80, the chances of dying double every 8 years. What happens after that, however, is not completely understood.

According to a controversial study published in 2016, which analyzed data from 40 different countries, the average person could reach 115 with the right genes and interventions, and a few genetic superstars would be able to do it at 125. But it was all, they argued. There was a wall of mortality that medicine and positive thinking simply can not overcome.

But not everyone is convinced by this data. That is why, for the new article of the journal Science the researchers examined the lifespan of 3836 people in Italy who reached the age of 105 or older between 2009 and 2015 and whose age has been verified. What they have found is that the Gompertz law is going a bit out of whack around the mark of the century. According to a press release, a 90 year old woman has a 15% chance of dying next year, and there is about six years left to live. At the age of 95, the probability of dying per year increases to 24%. At the age of 105, the chance to die makes another leap to 50 percent. But then, surprisingly, it stabilizes even beyond 110. In other words, at least statistically, every year a lucky person could return the coin, and if it gets to the head, she could live more than 115 or 125.

"Our data tell us that there is no fixed limit to human life still in sight," said lead author Kenneth Wachter UC Berkeley in the release. "Not only are we seeing mortality rates that continue to worsen with age, we see that they improve slightly over time."

Guarino reports that this study does not cover as many countries and data as previous studies, but the data quality is much better. This is because Italy closely monitors citizens, asking them to register with their city of residence each year. This means that researchers could confirm exactly when supercentennials were born and died. Other countries, including US social security files, are not as accurate, and in many cases, very old people tend to forget their exact age or add a few prestige years, which can pollute the data. "We have the advantage of better data," says Wachter to Elie Dolgin at Nature . "If we can get data of this quality for other countries, I think we will see the same thing."

So, why would mortality rates stabilize at such an extreme age? The geneticist Siegfried Hekimi of McGill University in Montreal tells Carl Zimmer, The New York Times that body cells accumulate damage that is only partially repaired. (Hekimi was not affiliated with the study.) Over time, all of this damage leads to aging bodily systems and death. It is possible that these very old people age more slowly, and that their bodies are able to follow the repairs.

Jay Olshansky, a bio-demographer from the University of Illinois at Chicago, however tells Dolgin that an endless plateau does not make sense. Some cells in the body, like neurons, he says, do not replicate. Instead, they simply fade and die, limiting the lifespan of humans

So, what can you do to stay alive until age 115 or older? Guarino reports that lifestyle choices like eating well and exercising are excellent for increasing life expectancy in the first 70 or 80 decades of life. After that, however, it all depends on genetics, and the lifestyle does not seem to matter. A 104-year-old woman attributes her longevity to drinking 3 Dr. Pepper sodas a day for 40 years. The oldest man in the United States is 112 years old and smokes 12 cigars a day. And Jeanne Louise Calment, the oldest woman in the world, who lived 122 years and 164 days in France, smoked two cigarettes a day until the age of 119, stopping only because she could not see enough to illuminate

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