With Jeanne Calment, there is only one documented case of a person who is more than 120 years old. The French woman, who died in 1997 at the age of 122, is unlikely to retain her special position in the foreseeable future, US researchers report in the journal Plos One.
In a study, they show that those age groups that benefit most from improvements in living conditions are only now reaching old age. This significantly increases the chance of new records.
The assumptions regarding the maximum possible lifespan of humans are the subject of many legends and myths and vary with the respective time: While the Hebrews assumed around 2,500 years ago that people cannot live longer than around 80 years, the Romans believed around 1,000 years later a human lifetime expiration date of 100 to 110 years. The fact that a new world longevity record has not been set for more than 25 years has prompted some to speculate whether the absolute age limit may not have already been reached, write Davis McCarthy of the University of Georgia and Po-Lin Wang of the University of Southern Germany Florida (both USA) in their work.
The scientists now analyzed the death data of older people in 19 industrialized countries, including Austria. The focus was on comparing different vintages. If the populations in the industrialized countries were actually already heading towards a more or less fixed limit for the maximum lifespan, one would have to observe an increasing concentration or concentration of the average age at death somewhere before the limit of the maximum lifespan. If, on the other hand, there is still room for improvement in terms of lifespan, you would not see such a “compaction of mortality”. The scientists explain that life expectancy would increase and the age at death would remain more spread out.
So the researchers looked in the data for signs of compression and real shifts in remaining life expectancy following age 50. “Condensation is the dominant pattern in the age cohorts born before 1900,” the paper states. In later years, however, the picture will be different. In the data from Austria – which, however, mostly includes people born in the 20th century – a development towards a real shift in mortality is apparent, especially in the age cohorts from the 1930s onwards. This fits with the processes in most other European countries that were analyzed by the scientists.
According to the authors of the study, the fact that this only became particularly important in the course of the 20th century also explains why the maximum lifespan has appeared so seemingly unchanging in recent decades. Now, however, more and more cohorts are getting very old, who were born later and benefit the most from various improvements in the health system or in nutrition. The remaining life expectancy following the age of 50 for people who are now between 70 and 110 years old is around eight years higher than in cohorts born earlier across all countries. According to the study, the lifetime maximum, if there is one, has not yet been reached.
This increases the chance that age records will be broken in some countries – including Austria – by the 2060s. If you look at the situation among women in Japan, who have already died at a very old age on average in the past few decades, a similar situation can be expected in many other countries.
However, the scientists emphasize that the falling of age records is far from certain. Whether people born before 1950 can actually live to be around 120 years or older depends heavily on how much political decisions take the health of older people into account. Last but not least, this requires stable political, ecological and economic conditions. The Covid 19 pandemic has recently shown impressively how quickly life expectancy can be reduced among older people.
