Increases in Life Span Are Beginning to Slow

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So much for the idea that most people born today will live 100 years or more.

New research shows that the dramatic increases in life expectancy seen during the 19th and 20th centuries have slowed considerably. 

In the world’s longest-living populations, life expectancy at birth has risen just 6.5 years, on average, since 1990, after nearly doubling over the 20th century as a result of advances in preventing disease. 

Humans appear to be hitting a biological limit to life, the evidence suggests. 

“Most people alive today at older ages are living on time that was manufactured by medicine,” said lead author S. Jay Olshansky, of the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. “But these medical Band-Aids are producing fewer years of life even though they’re occurring at an accelerated pace, implying that the period of rapid increases in life expectancy is now documented to be over.”

A child born in the United States today can expect to live to 77.5 years. A baby girl has a lifespan of 80.2 years and a boy, 74.8, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Olshansky has been studying life expectancy for decades. He published a paper in the journal Science in 1990 that said that people were approaching a ceiling for life expectancy at about 85. Others disagreed, forecasting that advances in health care would lead to further gains.

The new study — published Oct. 7 in the journal Nature Aging — forecasts that gains in life expectancy will continue to slow as more people experience the unyielding effects of aging. 

It looked at data from Hong Kong and eight countries where life expectancy is the highest and at the United States, one of a few countries where life expectancy dropped during the period studied.

“Our result overturns the conventional wisdom that the natural longevity endowment for our species is somewhere on the horizon ahead of us — a life expectancy beyond where we are today,” Olshansky said in a university news release. “Instead it’s behind us — somewhere in the 30- to 60-year range. We’ve now proven that modern medicine is yielding incrementally smaller improvements in longevity even though medical advances are occurring at breakneck speed.”

Even though more people may live to 100, they’ll be the exception, he said. That’s just the opposite of thinking among insurers and wealth-management firms, who make calculations based on the assumption that most people will live to be 100.

“This is profoundly bad advice,” Olshansky said.

While the study notes that science and medicine may produce further benefits, efforts to improve quality of life rather than extending it may make more sense. Researchers called for investment in geroscience, the biology of aging, arguing that it may be key to the next wave of health and life extension.

“This is a glass ceiling, not a brick wall,” Olshansky noted.

Reducing risk factors, working to eliminate disparities and encouraging people to embrace healthier lifestyles can enable people to live longer and healthier, he said. 

“We can push through the glass health and longevity ceiling with geroscience and efforts to slow the effects of aging,” he added.

More information

Learn more about life expectancy in the U.S. at the National Center for Health Statistics.

SOURCE: University of Illinois Chicago, news release, Oct. 7, 2024

Source: HealthDay

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