A university team analyzed mortality data from communities around the world where people live the longest. They found that the rapid increase in life expectancy achieved in the 20th century has sharply slowed down over the past three decades.
The researchers concluded that to accelerate life expectancy growth again, radically new medications that slow down the aging process need to be developed.
Scientists also believe that children recently born in regions with the oldest populations are unlikely to become centenarians. At best, researchers predict that only 15 percent of women and 5 percent of men in these areas will live to be 100 years old this century.
What else did the scientists reveal?
“If you plan to retire, you probably shouldn’t expect to live to 100,” said study leader Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics. “And if you want to enjoy the final stage of your life, you don’t necessarily have to spend it working to save money for a time you may not live to see,” he added.
Advancements in healthcare and medicine sparked a longevity revolution in the 20th century. For the previous 2,000 years, life expectancy increased by an average of one year every hundred or two hundred years. However, in the last century, life expectancy began to rise at an astonishing rate. Every ten years, people gained an additional three years, according to The Guardian.
This period of radical life extension led some researchers to extrapolate the trend and suggest that most people born after 2000 would live to be 100. However, in 1990, Professor Olshansky’s team deemed this theory questionable, asserting that people reach their biological ceiling at around 85 years.
During the latest study, the team gathered data on longevity regions from all corners of the globe, focusing on statistics from 1990 to 2019 (the period before the Covid pandemic). It turned out that all these regions experienced a significant slowdown in life expectancy.
In their report, the scientists noted that in the regions where people lived the longest, the average life expectancy increased by only 6.5 years over the study period. The team projected that for girls recently born there, the likelihood of living to 100 years is just 5.3 percent, while for boys, it’s only 1.8 percent.
Professor Olshansky remarked, “The game of longevity we are playing today is different from the game we played a hundred years ago when we were saving infants, children, and women of childbearing age, and the increase in life expectancy was significant. Now the increase is small because we are saving people aged 60, 70, 80, and 90.”
The scientist asserts that achieving another longevity revolution will require radically new treatments that slow aging—the biggest risk factor for many diseases. Research in this area is ongoing, and there are currently about a dozen drugs that help extend the lifespan of mice.
The findings of the study were published in the journal Nature Aging.