Is 125 years the upper limit for human lifespan?

The human body could be designed to live no longer than 125 years, according to new research.

While we now live longer than ever before, there does seem to be a natural cut off for the lifespan of the human body.

No human has ever lived longer than 122 years and researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, believe 125 years is the upper limit.

Even with ever more advances in health care and medical science, they do not expect to see a lot of 125 year old people around.

In fact the research team calculated that the chances of anyone living to 125 in any given year was one in 10,000.

Advances

Life expectancy has been increasing relentlessly since the nineteenth century thanks to better sanitation, greater understanding of how diseases are spread, vaccines, better diets and preventative medicine.

Given new advances in medical science every year and better drugs and clinical therapies to treat disease people are living longer than ever.

If there was no natural upper limit on human lifespan, the researchers say we should expect to see a large increase in the numbers of people living into extreme old age.

The researchers said: “The rate of improvement in survival peaks and then declines for very old age levels which points towards diminishing gains in reduction of late-life mortality and a possible limit to human lifespan.

“Our data strongly suggest that the duration of life is limited.”

Mortality

The team analysed data from the Human Mortality Database and the deaths of people over 110 in France, Japan, UK and US.

The data showed increases in life expectancy were slowing in centenarians and that the maximum age of death had plateaued for at least two decades.

One of the researchers, Professor Jan Vijg, said: “In people over 105 we make very little progress, that tells you we are most likely approaching the limit to human life.

“For the first time in history we’ve been able to see this, it looks like the maximum life span – this ceiling, this barrier – is about 115.

Dismal

“It’s almost impossible you’ll get beyond it, you need 10,000 world’s like ours to end up with one individual in a given year who will live until 125 – so a very small chance.”

However not every scientist agrees with the findings. Prof James Vaupel, from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, dismissed the study as a “dismal travesty” and said it added nothing to the scientific knowledge about how long we will live.

 

 

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