If blowing out the candles on your 100th birthday cake is a pillar of your retirement plan, you may want to skip to the next article.
An analysis of mortality data from the world’s long-lived populations shows that the rapid improvements in life expectancy achieved in the 20th century have slowed dramatically in the past three decades.
The finding suggests that if 100 is to become the new 80, radical new medicines are needed that slow the aging process itself, rather than better treatments for common killers such as cancer, dementia and heart disease.
According to the study, children born recently in regions with the oldest people are far from likely to become centenarians. At best, the researchers predict that 15% of women and 5% of men in the oldest habitats will reach 100 this century.
“If you’re planning for retirement, it’s probably not a good idea to assume you’re going to make it to 100,” says Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “You will probably have to work at least 10 years longer than you think. And you want to enjoy the last phase of your life, you don’t necessarily want to work on saving for time you won’t experience.”
Advances in public health and medicine sparked a long-lasting revolution in the 20th century. In the previous 2,000 years, life expectancy rose by an average of one year every century or two. In the 20th century, average life expectancy skyrocketed, with people gaining an extra three years each decade.
The period of radical life extension prompted some researchers to extrapolate the trend and suggests that most people born after 2000 would survive to age 100. But the prospect was challenged in 1990 by Olshansky and his colleagues, who argued that humans reach a biological ceiling of about 85 years of age.
For the latest study, Olshansky delved into national statistics from the US and nine regions with the highest life expectancies, focusing on 1990 to 2019, before the Covid pandemic struck. The data from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden and Spain showed that increases in life expectancy have slowed dramatically. In the US, life expectancy has fallen.
Write in Natural agingthe researchers describe how life expectancy in the regions with the longest life increased by only 6.5 years on average between 1990 and 2019. They predict that girls born recently in the regions have only a 5.3% chance of to be 100 years old, while boys have a 1.8% chance.
“In the modern era, through public health and medicine, we have produced decades of life that otherwise would not have existed,” Olshansky said. “These gains must slow down. The longevity game we play today is different from the longevity game we played a century ago when we saved babies and children and women of childbearing age and life expectancy was great. Now the profit is small because we save people in their 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.”
Olshansky said it will take radical new treatments that slow aging, the biggest risk factor for many diseases, to achieve another longevity revolution. Research in the field is ongoing with a dozen or so drugs that have been shown to increase the lifespan of mice.
to newsletter promotion
In 2000, Steven Austad, a professor of healthy aging at the University of Birmingham in Alabama, bet Olshansky that the first person to live to 150 had already been born. Thanks to compound interest, the winner, or his offspring, will win millions of dollars by the time the bet is settled.
“For life expectancy to accelerate again, we need a new approach focused on disease prevention,” Austad said. “Geroscience focuses on improving health by treating the underlying biological processes of aging, which underlie virtually all the ailments that impair our quality of life or kill us.”
“These advances are starting to make their way to the clinic,” he added. “As much as I buy this analysis of delayed life expectancy increase, the authors’ projection for a continued gradual slowdown for the rest of this century strikes me as premature.”
The most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics shows that life expectancy at birth in the UK from 2020 to 2022 stood at 82.6 years for women and 78.6 for men, which is back to 2010-2012 levels for women and below that level for men.
