2024-10-08 13:00:14
It is a debate that has agitated demographers for thirty years: can human life expectancy continue to increase as quickly as was the case in the second half of the 20th century? While she was probably stagnating between 20 and 50 years old until the beginning of the 19th century, life expectancy in fact experienced a « boom » after the Second World War thanks to advances in medicine and public health, leading to a longevity revolution. For more than fifty years, humans then gained up to three years of life expectancy per decade, compared to one year in one or two centuries previously.
According to a new study published Monday October 7 in the journal Nature Agingthis increase in exceptional life expectancy has stalled for thirty years in the countries where it is the highest. A slowdown which, according to researchers, should continue into the 21st century in the absence of significant progress in controlling the biological aging process.
To support their study, the four American scientists focused their research on the eight countries whose populations reached the highest levels of life expectancy between 1990 and 2019 (Australia, France, Italy , Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland), as well as the Hong Kong region and the United States, which constitute a special case, since the life expectancy of Americans marks the not since the 2010s and has been very heavily impacted by the Covid-19 epidemic.
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Their calculations show that on average, these populations have only gained 6.5 years in thirty years, that is to say a level much lower than the previous period. Only South Korea and Hong Kong have experienced these exceptional rhythms described as“radical extension of lifespan”a gain of around three months every year. The Hong Kong case shows that economic prosperity and its very strict anti-smoking laws were decisive factors.
“Glass Ceiling of Longevity”
“This observed slowdown is a consequence medical successsays Jay Olshansky, professor of public health at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and first author of the study. This occurs when more and more people survive to old age, when the biological process of aging becomes the dominant risk factor. » The epidemiologist has been the defender since the 1990s of the idea according to which humanity was going to reach a sort of glass ceiling of longevity, overtaken by its biological limits. Other demographers, like James Vaupel, who died in 2022, have theorized on the contrary that these limits could be overcome thanks to future scientific revolutions. “This article is a sort of post-mortem response to Vaupel”underlines Carlo Giovanni Camarda, research director at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), who did not participate in the study.
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