Despite the ubiquity of stories from various news outlets concerning the oldest person in the world or the oldest man in the United States, new research published in Nature Aging indicates that those anecdotes are anomalies.
According to the study, which utilized lifespans in countries with the longest living populations, average improvements in life expectancy in the United States, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, and Sweden have been trending down since 1990.
According to its analysis, it is unlikely that more than 15% of women and 5% of men will survive beyond 100.
Jay Olshansky, a gerontologist and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the study’s primary author, told CNN that he and some of his colleagues predicted in 1990
that increases in life expectancy would eventually plateau.“In 1990, we predicted increases in life expectancy would slow down, and the effects of medical interventions, which we call Band-Aids, would have less and less of an effect on life expectancy,” Olshansky told the outlet.
Olshansky continued, “A lot of people disagreed with us. They said, ‘No, no, NO!’ Advances in medical and life-extending technologies will accelerate and will drag life expectancy along with it. We waited 30 years to test our hypothesis. We have shown the era of rapid increases in human life expectancy has ended, just as we predicted.”
However, Olshansky wanted to ensure that the data is not misinterpreted.
“Now, I want to make sure that this is interpreted correctly,” he added. “We’re still gaining life expectancy, but it’s at an increasingly slower pace than in previous decades.”
According to Olshansky, the fact that more people don’t live to advanced ages is not really a negative. It actually means that people are experiencing aging in a normal manner.
“If you expose enough people in a population to the immutable force of aging, you run up against a roadblock that makes it difficult to achieve further gains in life expectancy, and that’s where we are now. You can continue to make progress against major diseases, but it’s not going to have the life-extending effect that people think — in fact, it will have a diminishing effect.” Olshanky said.
Olshansky continued, “This is a consequence of success. It is not a consequence of failure. It’s a consequence of allowing people to live long enough to experience the biological process of aging, which now is the dominant risk factor.”
Olshansky also cautioned against the idea that extending longevity is a worthy goal; instead, he advocated for healthspan extension as the better metric for quality of life.
“The metric of success should not be lifespan extension. It should be a healthspan extension. This is something we can measure, and this is something we all desire. In fact, I would argue that health span is the most precious commodity on Earth, and we are in the business of manufacturing as much of it as we can,” Olshansky said.
Olshansky concluded, “Remember, death is a zero-sum
game. One thing goes down, something else goes up, and the fear is that we’re going to replace cancer and cardiovascular disease with dementia, Alzheimer’s, and other serious health challenges that we can’t currently modify. So we have to be careful what we wish for and what we manufacture going forward because life extension without health extension would be harmful.”RELATED CONTENT: New Study Shows Black People Live Longer in Counties with Black Physicians