What does it depend on if we can live up to 150 years?

Economic and health conditions come into play, but our biological system ages and has an expiration date. Although Freddie Mercury questioned this very human desire to achieve immortality, the truth is that man has always been interested in understanding the mechanisms of aging and, as far as possible, delaying or slowing them down to extend our life expectancy.

A recent study published in Nature and led by Timothy Pyrkov, a researcher at Gero, a powerful biotechnology company based in Singapore, has analysed the rate of population ageing in the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia. Their conclusions are that we could have a life expectancy between 120 and 150 years. But no more.

Main causes of death

According to data from the World Health Organization, the main causes of death in the world can be attributed to three large groups: cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases and neonatal conditions.

The latter are, in fact, the main cause of death in poor countries, whose inhabitants are also much more likely to die from a communicable disease , such as pneumonia, diarrhoea or tuberculosis.

Meanwhile, in the most developed countries there is a higher incidence of cancer or even Alzheimer’s, and much lower of the rest of the causes of death in developing countries.

The WHO says that it is important to know what people die from in order to improve the way of life and because it helps determine the effectiveness of our health systems.

Does human life have a limit?

Taking into account all these death factors, let’s put ourselves in the hypothetical case of living in a developed country, having iron health and not being affected by any disease that ends our life. How long could we live?

That is, basically, what the researchers of the study we mentioned earlier have considered and studied. According to their conclusions, even if we do not suffer from some of the factors that usually end our lives (cancer, heart problems or accidents), our body’s ability to restore the balance of its countless structural and metabolic systems deteriorates over time.

In other words, we have an expiration date, even if we live with the best sanitary conditions, in a developed country, our genes are unbeatable and we do not have any trauma or disease.

Stable health

To conduct this study, the researchers selected large population cohorts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia. To assess deviations from the stable health of these populations, they analyzed changes in blood cell counts and the daily number of steps taken and analyzed them by age groups.

In both blood cell count and step counts, the pattern was the same: as age increases, there is some factor (beyond disease) that causes a predictable and incremental decrease in the body’s ability to return blood cells or to restart walking at a stable level after a stop.

Once they had determined the rate of deterioration of the body, they used that measurement to calculate when the ability to restart would completely disappear, leading to death. This is when they came to the conclusion that the limit of human life is between 120 and 150 years of age.

Living longer or better

Since 1900, the world’s average life expectancy has doubled. Although it is now over 70 years old, there are still significant inequalities between some countries and others (even within each state): the country with the lowest life expectancy is the Central African Republic (53 years) and the one with the highest figure in this metric is Japan (85 years, 32 more). Spain is at the top of the table, which is leading to an ageing population.

We could conclude that, despite the progress of medicine, treatments and cures, and despite the fact that we are able to overcome some causes of death, the fundamental biological processes that cause aging will continue until the end of our days.

The loss of resilience, even in the healthiest and most successful aging individuals, could explain why we don’t see an obvious increase in maximum life expectancy.

In 2018, our expert Jay Olshansky already told us about how we could stop aging and therefore live better.

Supercentenarians

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the person who was alive the longest was the Frenchwoman Jeanne Louise Calment, who died at the age of 122 years and 164 days. The oldest person still alive is Kane Tanaka, at 117 years old.

Taking into account the existence of several supercentenarians (people who live more than a hundred years), other researchers carried out a study in which they tried to answer what could be the longest human life expectancy anywhere in the world by the year 2100. To calculate the probability of living beyond the age of 110 and how old you might be, the researchers used the latest version of the International Database on Longevity, created by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. That database tracks supercentenarians from 10 European countries, plus Canada, Japan and the United States.

Among the conclusions of the report we can highlight that the researchers believe that there is a 99% chance that someone will live to 124 years old and even to 127 years old (68% probability). However, they consider it “extremely unlikely” that someone will live to be 135 years old, at least in this century.

Closing the gap between health and life expectancy

For this reason, some see in the study on human resilience a way not so much to slow down the aging process, but to be able to control morbidity, reduce the impact of diseases and expand quality of life, especially in the last stretch.

In other words, a new way of understanding how our body ages, what biomarkers can be measured and how to act on them.

And, ultimately, to close the gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy. To give you an idea, in 2019, the number of years of healthy life at birth was calculated at 65.1 years for women and 64.2 years for men in the EU, which represented approximately 77.5% and 81.8% of total life expectancy for women and men.

Not surprisingly, one of the keys is that, if you live longer, they have a good quality. Whether increased longevity is accompanied by good health is crucial.