theScientific progress does not translate into sharp jumps in overall life expectancy, according to researchers who found that the decline in longevity is greater in countries with the longest-living populations.
S said “We have to realize that there is a limit,” said Jay Olshansky, a researcher at the University of Illinois-Chicago and the University of Illinois-Chicago. Estimates of when people should retire and how much money they will need to live their lives may need to be re-evaluated. The lead author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Aging.
Mark Hayward, a researcher at the University of Texas who was not involved in the study, called the study “a valuable addition to the literature on mortality,” the Associated Press reported.
“We have reached a plateau” in life expectancy, he added.
Hayward stressed that it is always possible that some progress could raise the bar of survival to greater levels, “but that does not currently exist.”
Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a child born in a given year can be expected to live, assuming that death rates at that time remain constant.
It's one of the world's most important health measures, but it's also imperfect: It's a quick estimate that can't take into account deadly pandemics, miracle cures or other unexpected developments that could kill or save millions of people.
In the new research, Olshansky and his research partners tracked life expectancy estimates for the years 1990 to 2019, extracted from a database run by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.
The researchers focused on eight places in the world where people live the longest – Australia, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Switzerland.
Olshansky explained that the United States is not even in the top 40 countries, but is also included because of previous bold estimates that life expectancy in the United States could increase significantly this century.
Women are still living longer than men, and improvements in life expectancy continue to occur — but at a slow pace, researchers have found.
In 1990, the average amount of improvement was about two and a half years per decade. In the 2000s, it was a year and a half – and almost zero in the United States.
The United States is more problematic because it is hardest hit by a host of issues that kill people before they even reach old age, including drug overdoses, shootings, obesity, and inequality that makes it difficult for some people to get adequate medical care.
But in one calculation, the researchers estimated what would happen at all nine sites if all deaths before the age of 50 were eliminated. The increase was, at best, still only a year and a half away, Olshansky said.
“We are extracting less and less life from these life-extending technologies. The reason is that aging is getting in the way,” he added.
The number of centenarians is likely to increase in the coming decades, according to experts, but this is due to population growth.
Olshansky stressed that the percentage of people who reach 100 will remain limited, with perhaps less than 15% of women and 5% of men reaching this point in most countries.
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