Human Life Expectancy Has Likely Maxed Out

Increase in human life expectancy, which nearly doubled over the last century, may be slowing, according to a new study.

While advances in medicine, diet, and public health have helped people live longer, the researchers say that living beyond 100 may be farther off than many experts had hoped.

“But these medical Band-Aids are producing fewer years of life even though they’re occurring at an accelerated pace.”

This is because while people are now prevented from dying from infectious diseases, they are now succumbing to age-related diseases that occur from biological aging.

“Unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century,” the authors wrote in their study.

Dr. Nir Barzilai, who is a world-renowned leader in geroscience (the study of biological aging and age-related diseases), pushed back against against the study’s conclusion, noting that while the statistical ceiling for human lifespan may be around 100, the biological ceiling is 115 years.

“It’s a statistical thing we all agree on,” Barzilai told The Epoch Times, who is director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adding that while rare individuals like Jeanne Calment have lived beyond 120 years, 115 is widely considered the biological maximum for human lifespan.

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Slowing of Life Expectancy Gains

The study, which analyzed mortality data from the 1990s to 2019 across nine wealthy countries, including Australia, South Korea, and the United States—found that life expectancy increased by just 6.5 years on average during this period.

Although life expectancy continues to rise, the pace of improvement has slowed. In 1990, the average amount of improvement in high-income countries was about 2.5 years per decade. In the 2010s, it was 1.5 years.

This represents a significant deceleration compared to earlier periods.

Women continue to outlive men.

Life expectancy is the average number of years a newborn is expected to live, assuming current death rates remain unchanged. While this measure is crucial, it is imperfect—it doesn’t account for unpredictable events like pandemics or medical breakthroughs that could alter survival rates.

In the United States, life expectancy reached 78.8 years in 2019, but the rate of increase slowed significantly between 2010 and 2019. This analysis excluded the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a sharp decline in U.S. life expectancy.

Based on these trends, researchers predict that life expectancy at birth will not exceed 84 for men and 90 for women. They also estimate that only a minority of newborns today, or 15 percent of females and 5 percent of males, will live to 100.

“This is a glass ceiling, not a brick wall,” Olshansky said. “There’s plenty of room for improvement: for reducing risk factors, working to eliminate disparities and encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles—all of which can enable people to live longer and healthier.”

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Challenging the Idea of Radical Life Extension

One of the study’s major conclusions challenges the idea that most people born today will live to be 100 or beyond. Olshansky argues that while some individuals may surpass 100, these cases will remain exceptions, not the norm.

He added that their results challenge the commonly held belief that humans are on the verge of reaching a natural maximum lifespan. “Instead, it’s behind us,” he said.

This finding pushes back against industries—such as insurance and wealth management—that increasingly make calculations assuming that most people will live to 100. Olshansky says that this assumption is “profoundly bad advice,” as only a small percentage of the population will likely live that long in this century. “We’re talking about outliers, not the average,” he said.

The rapid acceleration in life expectancy growth observed during the 20th century was partly due to the control of infectious diseases and the rise of public health measures. But at this stage, gains have slowed, particularly facing new challenges like chronic diseases, which is a result of having an aging population.

“It’s the biology of aging that drives diseases,” explained Barzilai. “You can be born with genes of Alzheimer’s, but when you’re born, you don’t have Alzheimer’s. When you’re one year or 10 year or 50 years, you don’t have Alzheimer’s. It’s the aging process.”

He added, “This aging process is what we’re trying to target so that we can prevent diseases. Now, if we prevent disease, it means also that we live longer.”

“We already have diets, exercises, medicines, whole body scans, cancer-detecting blood tests, and medical procedures that can extend life by many years when implemented,” he said in an email to The Epoch Times.

While Sinclair, who is a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, agrees that we are far from living to 150 with current technology, he believes future generations may see significant advancements.

“Children born today will see the 22nd century, and who knows what technologies will be available then,” he said, comparing the current state of technology to transportation in the 1800s, when the fastest human travel was by horse. “To say the fastest humans could ever travel is a gallop would be wrong.”

Barzilai shares this optimism.

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Pushing Through the ‘Glass Ceiling’

The idea of a “glass ceiling” on human lifespan is central to Barzilai’s view of the future. “We have a roof, and we could achieve something with the right medical interventions,” he said.

“We can push through this glass ceiling by slowing the biological effects of aging.” In the future, Barzilai believes that by targeting aging itself, medical science may be able to significantly improve healthspan, allowing people to live longer and healthier lives, even if they don’t surpass the 115-year mark.

“It’s one thing to say we cannot extend lifespan, but the bigger question is whether we can make the years leading up to 115 healthier and more productive,” Barzilai added.

Olshansky advocates for a shift in focus from longevity to “healthspan”—the number of years a person remains healthy, not just alive. He notes that extending life expectancy could be detrimental if those added years are not lived in good health.

He advocates for greater investment in geroscience, which is focused on biological aging and age-related disease, and may hold the key to the next wave of health and life extension.

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