According to a new study, there may be a limit to how long humans can live.
A French woman Jeanne Calment was the oldest known person, who died in 1997 at age 122. Calment’s endurance record is unlikely to be broken, the researchers stated.
The researchers wrote in their study, issued on Oct. 5 in the journal Nature; ‘ In contrast to earlier suggestions that human longevity can be increased ever further, our data strongly suggest that the span of life is limited,’
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However, the new conclusions don’t mean that researchers know for sure that humans will never exist longer than 122 years, a professor of biology and aging at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Steven Austad said; ‘that scientists used to think that the limit to the human life span was 110 years until somebody lived to be older than that, which explains that it is tough to foretell what this limit can be for humans.
In the new study, the researchers studied at the Human Mortality Database, it’s an international database with specific mortality data that’s kept by researchers at the Max Plank Institutes in Germany and the University of California, Berkeley. The database holds information on how long people have lived in last decades in many nations.
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The researchers found that, in at least forty countries and territories, the number of people enduring to age 70 and older has improved since 1900. This proposes that people’s life expectancy, or the estimation of how long a person may expect to live, has improved.
However, if there is no limit to how long people can exist, then the greatest increases in endurance rates over time should have happened among those people who are the oldest, the researchers amazed. But the data revealed that the greatest increase in endurance rates among people in the oldest age groups in most nations peaked around 1980, and has not changed since. This may propose that, after all, there may be a natural limit to how long people can exist, the researchers stated.
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The scientists also examined to see how old the very oldest people were when they died. They concentrated on deaths between 1968 and 2006, in Japan, France the United Kingdom and the United States, which are the 4 countries with the highest numbers of people who have lived longer than age of 110 years, according to the International Database on Longevity. The researchers also observed at the maximum reported age at death between 1972 and 2015 stated by another source, called the Gerontology Research Group.
The researchers found that, though the highest reported age at death did increase until the 1990s, it has actually the period, and even slightly reduced since the time Jeanne Calment passed away.
But Austad stated that the human life span could likely still be prolonged. Tests on mice have shown that these animals live longer if their calorie intake is limited or if their genes are manipulated.
If researchers found medicines or lifestyle factors such as specific diets that are better than the ones known today, that could let humans live longer.
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