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Are the brakes being applied on growing too old? A recent study suggests as much. In fact, analysis undertaken by a team of gerontologists claims that most of today’s children are unlikely to live to 100. It's a worrying revelation, especially as modern medicine appears to have boosted longevity over the past half-century. So why might kids not survive long enough to celebrate their 100th birthday?
Click through this gallery and find out why a centenarian may become a thing of the past.
The chances of children born today reaching 100 years of age are extremely unlikely, a recent study has suggested.
In the report, published in the journal Nature Aging, gerontologists claim that the era of rapid increases in human life expectancy has ended.
The authors based their findings on analysis of lifespan data from Australia, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.
Overall, female children born in 2019 in these places have a 5.1% chance of reaching 100 years of age, the study said.
The average probability of a male surviving to age 100 is 1.8%.
In 1990, the report's lead author Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois in Chicago, hypothesized that humanity was approaching an upper limit to life expectancy in long-lived populations.
They believed the number of years a person can expect to live would be vastly reduced, the effects of medical interventions having less and less of an impact on life expectancy.
The prediction back then was that children, on average, would live to only age 85—only 1% to 5% might survive until their 100th birthday.
Many gerontologists disagreed with Olshansky and his colleagues, arguing that advances in medical and life-extending technologies would accelerate and haul life expectancy along with it.
Nearly 25 years later, its appears the forecast made by Olshansky and his colleagues has been proven.
But, insists Olshansky, these latest results need to be interpreted correctly. Humanity is still gaining life expectancy, he added, but at an increasingly slower pace than in previous decades. So what exactly does his analysis of longevity data reveal?
Becoming a centenarian, a person who has reached the age of 100, has long been a marker of extraordinary longevity.
But one of the central questions in science, aging, and public health today is: how much longer are humans capable of living?
To answer this question, the team explored recent trends in death rates and life expectancy, from 1990 to 2019, using demographic survivorship metrics from national vital statistics in the aforementioned eight countries and territories with the longest-lived populations.
Their findings contradict the popular notion that humans will soon be able to live to 120, even 150 years of age.
Instead, Olshansky warns that the prospect of what he terms radical life expectancy is a fallacy, a mistaken belief.
"Aging is currently immutable—it's the decline of your cells, tissues, organs and organ systems that currently can't be stopped," he said in an interview with CNN.
"If you expose enough people in a population to the immutable force of aging, you run up against a roadblock that makes it difficult to achieve further gains in life expectancy, and that's where we are now."
"You can continue to make progress against major diseases, but it's not going to have the life-extending effect that people think—in fact, it will have a diminishing effect."
This is "a consequence of allowing people to live long enough to experience the biological process of aging," he adds, "which now is the dominant risk factor. The only way we can break through this glass ceiling of longevity is if we slow the biological process of aging."
Obesity in the population is playing a major role in lowering the life expectancy of today's generation of children. The condition invariably leads to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other medical disorders.
In fact, a paper published by Olshansky in 2005 suggested that this will be the first generation of youngsters to live a shorter lifespan than their parents, due to obesity.
Health experts point to other contributing factors influencing this shift, including unhealthy lifestyle choices, environmental degradation, economic inequality, and access to health care.
Conversely, the 20th century saw global life expectancy steadily increase due mainly to improvements in health care, sanitation, and living conditions.
The eradication or control of many infectious diseases, the development and distribution of vaccines, and the widespread availability of antibiotics all contributed to this rise.
However, recent studies, including that published in Nature Aging, suggest that the dramatic progress witnessed in the last century has slowed considerably.
"The modern era is filled with people living into their 70s, 80s, and a few in their 90s and beyond," pointed out Olshansky, "almost all of whom are living on time that has been manufactured by medical technology—manufactured time that physicians across the globe have created for us."
"[But] the metric of success should not be lifespan extension," he insisted. "It should be health span extension."
"In fact, I would argue that health span is the most precious commodity on Earth and we are in the business of manufacturing as much of it as we can."
Sources: (CNN) (Nature Aging)
See also: Countries with the longest life expectancy, ranked
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Are the brakes being applied on growing too old? A recent study suggests as much. In fact, analysis undertaken by a team of gerontologists claims that most of today’s children are unlikely to live to 100. It's a worrying revelation, especially as modern medicine appears to have boosted longevity over the past half-century. So why might kids not survive long enough to celebrate their 100th birthday?
Click through this gallery and find out why a centenarian may become a thing of the past.