How Long Can We Live? The Limit Hasn’t Been Reached, Study Finds

For more than a century the life expectancy of humans as doubled due to bettering health care, sanitation, and food supplies. Dr Barbi of the University of the Rome published research in the journal Science claiming that we are not yet to a biological limit, if indeed there is one.

The current record for the longest human life span is a Frenchwoman that passed away at the ripe old age of 122 in 1997. Dr. Barbi and her team used birth certificates to track down elderly Italians who has reached the age of 105 between 2009 and 2015, resulting in a list of over 3,800. Though the “death rate” increases at infancy and at 70, according to Dr. Barbi there appears to be a plateau when people manage to live to be “extremely elderly.”

“The plateau is sinking over time,” said Kenneth W. Wachter, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the new study. “Improvements in mortality extend even to these extreme ages…We’re not approaching any maximum life span for humans yet.”

Brandon Milholland, a co-author of a separate study finding a limit to human life span, questioned the new paper. The research, he noted, was limited to just seven years in one country.

See Carl Zimmer, How Long Can We Live? The Limit Hasn’t Been Reached, Study Finds, New York Times, June 28, 2018.

Special thanks to Lewis Saret (Attorney, Washington, D.C.) for bringing this article to my attention.