19 ms·
What's the Longest Humans Can Live?
- imgabe 10y agoDo they mean that the average life expectancy at birth will not exceed 115? Because the article opens by noting that the current record is 122, so obviously some individuals will exceed 115, seeing as several already have.
- bharath28 10y agoThat article was incredibly hard to read and poorly written. The message was so confusing, i didn't know what to make of it - i came away with the same conclusion as you did.
- bbctol 10y agoThe paper seems to essentially say the peak will remain near 115, and the average will never exceed. Obviously, some people will live longer than 115 years, but we'll never expect to regular see our oldest exceed that.
- Shendare 10y agoThat article could not keep straight whether it was talking about average lifespans or maximum expected lifespans, or maybe average maximum expected lifespans? The only claim it managed to get across to me was that we can expect the end of the lifespan bell curve to get steeper and steeper as average lifespans continue to increase from better longevity, while maximum lifespans (and the number of people who reach them) increase at a much slower rate.
- scj 10y agoHere's how I'd state my interpretation: "Statistical analysis suggests that supercentenarians are becoming more common. However, even as their numbers increase overall, the number of people aged beyond 115 is negligible." The abstract for the paper itself ( http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature19793.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu... ), seems to only discuss the statistical existence of an aging limit, not the biological mechanism(s) causing it.
- samfisher83 10y agoSeems like they just made a quote to get attention. “It seems highly likely we have reached our ceiling,” said Dr. Vijg, an expert on aging at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “From now on, this is it. Humans will never get older than 115.” I am guessing someone will live past 115. There has already been 1. Probability is very small, but I don't think its 0.
- duaneb 10y agoI'm assuming they mean average.
- pazimzadeh 10y agoIt's too bad that the cost to sequence a human genome was above $100 million dollars in 1997. Of course, by the time Jeanne Calment was 122 years old her genome would have accumulated thousands of mutations, so what we would have needed is to sequence her in 1875, the year that she was born (someone correct me if I'm wrong). Now that the price of sequencing the human genome is ~$1000, is it worthwhile to sequence all newborns, so that on the off chance that a person is a long lived anomaly we can study what made them so?
- mabbo 10y agoIt could be that those mutations were what kept her alive so long.
- Hermel 10y agoNot every cell changes the same way. So if you have a large enough set of DNA samples from distinct cells, you could probably reconstruct the original.
- pazimzadeh 10y agoGood point. I thought have thought of that - otherwise how are we able to reconstruct the genetic makeup of Neanderthals or any other extinct species?
- sp332 10y agoI don't think most cells would have accumulated mutations. Sequencing DNA from several samples should still give a pretty clear result.
- Practicality 10y agoThis is pretty much what our sex cells are. It's part of why newborns are so healthy, genetically. And they only use two cells.
- hyperbovine 10y agoThe genetic basis of longevity is highly debatable. But anyways, just sequence her kids. Not that it matters so much, since even if we had that information we wouldn't know what to do with it. Longevity is a highly polygenic trait, and as it stands we barely understand the genetic architecture of even much simpler ones like height.
- mabbo 10y agoWith all the work on longevity going on right now, and the near-infinite demand for it should it ever come to market, it's almost inevitable that someone will eventually have drugs/procedures that buy you more years. The only real question in my mind is whether we are the first generation to live forever, or the last generation to die?
- goatlover 10y agoIf you don't die of aging, you'll die of something else, be it cancer, heart disease, an accident, etc. And anyway, entropy has the final say no matter what you do to upload or back yourself up.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago> If you don't die of aging, you'll die of something else, be it cancer, heart disease, an accident, etc. All of those things are fixable too, and the medical ones are heavily correlated with aging. Cancer, in particular, is becoming more prevalent because it's almost a "default": if you don't die of anything else, and you continue to experience aging-related degeneration, you have a high likelihood of getting cancer. > And anyway, entropy has the final say no matter what you do to upload or back yourself up. Give us a few billion years to work on that one.
- reasonattlm 10y agoThe sort of question for yourself to take away from this is "what does 'natural lifespan' mean?" Obviously it has been a long time since humans have experienced a natural lifespan in the one rigorous no-technology definition of the term. Is maximum lifespan moving much? Hard to say. The data gets really sparse out beyond 110, where estimated mortality rates are 50%+/yr, and really sparse the further back in time you look. So it isn't unreasonable to hold the position that maximum life span is increasing, but slowly. Adult life expectancy at 60 is going up a year every decade, but there are so few people living to > 115 that you can't really say much about their statistics. Maybe that is going up too. Equally it isn't unreasonable to hold the position that transthyretin amyloid aggregation is a fairly equitable process that will absolutely kill everyone prior to 130. That it acts as a hard full stop on how far you can get with, even if you avoid everything else. (That this form of amyloid is what kills the majority of supercentenarians is the conclusion drawn from the limited autopsy data for people that old). This of course is because no currently available medical technology greatly impacts transthyretin amyloid (though Pentraxin Therapeutics completed initial human trials of a clearance therapy in 2015 - stuck in regulatory/Big Pharma hell, but it works). You can be as heavily treated with the best of medicine as you like, but that amyloid is still accumulating, and eventually it clogs your cardiovascular system and you die. If there was no transthyretin amyloid in the picture, I'd wager we'd have 120yr-olds in the same way that we have 110yr-olds today - a larger number of them, but still small. We'd also have 10-20% less heart disease at all ages, and a range of other conditions that are caused in old people by this form of amyloid. Amyloid clearance is a good thing, there should be more support for it.
- GnarlyWhale 10y agoNo one tell Ray Kurzweil.
- DavidHm 10y agoDon't worry, his bubble of denial is inviolable.
- neolefty 10y agoNote that this is a purely statistical analysis of the situation: > “You’d need 10,000 worlds like ours to have the chance that there would be one human who would become 125 years,” said Dr. Vijg. It says nothing about medical breakthroughs, which could have nonlinear, bell-curve-defying effects.
- draaglom 10y agoIt does say something about medical breakthroughs -- since they're happening all the time and not shifting this upper bound very much. This is not to say that a medical breakthrough which changes the limit is impossible, but it has to compete against an exponential mortality curve. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_of_mortality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_o...
- theli0nheart 10y ago> It does say something about medical breakthroughs -- since they're happening all the time and not shifting this upper bound very much. Given that those who are 115 today were 85 when breakthroughs were made three decades ago, I'd say that we simply don't have the data yet to make that assessment.
- alejohausner 10y agoGompertz's law looks very grim. The death RATE grows exponentially with age. And it's such a nice straight line on a semilog plot, from age 40 through 100. I don't see how medical advances can budge that one.
- duaneb 10y agoThis would be the breakthrough of all breakthroughs to move the tail end of the curve.
- neves 10y agoAnd you won't be able to pay for it! Imagine someone invents a treatment that prolongs your healthy life in 30 years. How much would Gates, Buffet, and Slim pay for it? For how much would he would sell? Do you think some middle class guy would be able to pay for it?
- dahdum 10y agoThe article is poorly written, but the actual abstract is pretty clear: "Here, by analysing global demographic data, we show that improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and that the age at death of the world’s oldest person has not increased since the 1990s. Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints." I don't think this isn't a real surprise, but it shows that you can't link the rise in life expectancy to maximum life spans. For example, fewer infants dying doesn't mean that humans can live longer, but the overall average goes up.
- ianai 10y agoWithout considering it much, this feels like an abuse of data and statistical methods. It's like they've got 20 years of data and are extrapolating out to infinity. It's like modeling real estate prices on 20 years of data and saying whatever happened in those 20 years is all that can happen in all time frames. Forecasting 101 tells you the folly of that idea. If you have 20 years of data then you have 20 years of data. Maybe what they've uncovered is something like "max human age without treatment". Surely they can't rule out the effects of future medical advancements.
- dahdum 10y agoI think it's just sensationalist science journalism like usual. The research is well done, the reporting stinks. Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- adonovan 10y agoGravity and Levity presented in 2009 a much better intuitive model and mathematical principle that explains this bold pronouncement: https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/ https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-...
- diziet 10y agoThere have been 40 people who have lived past 115 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe... 4 of them are still alive.
- jedberg 10y agoAmusingly the oldest living person happens to be tied for 7th today, but as long as she makes it to tomorrow, she'll move into 6th place.
- coldtea 10y agoSo, 40 in 7 billion. I don't think this refutes the article's analysis of the averages.
- diziet 10y agoI just thought it would be an interesting additional piece of information for this discussion.
- coldtea 10y agoAnd it is. Just making a point of outliers vs averages.
- bluedino 10y agoIf there are 7 billion on earth today, a much higher number than that have lived and died in a 120 year olds lifetime
- huherto 10y agoInteresting. It also seems like she is the last living person from the 19th century.
- artur_makly 10y agomy grandpa is 102. Russian genes! To think he was born during the Russian Revolution is mind blowing. i think his gen more than ours underwent more positive Quantum leaps than mine ever will.
- pyrophane 10y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but this result doesn't seem particularly controversial or astounding. We've assumed for some time now that while we can increase the average life expectancy by getting better at treating diseases, there is still this thing called "aging" that is going to kill us at some relatively fixed point. These results don't suggest to me that we are "never" going to live longer than 115 or so, but rather that we aren't going to get there just by taking away disease roadblocks. We would need to master the natural process of aging that serves to kill us once we have outlived our evolutionary purpose of reprodution.
- catscratch 10y ago> We would need to master the natural process of aging that serves to kill us once we have outlived our evolutionary purpose Related to aging is the length of our telomeres. Doing a search through recent news brings up some interesting related topics like: Childhood trauma causes shortened telomeres (and shortens life): http://www.medicaldaily.com/childhood-trauma-may-shorten-telomeres-cause-early-aging-adults-399966 http://www.medicaldaily.com/childhood-trauma-may-shorten-tel... Acne-sufferers may have longer telomeres (and live longer): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161003133005.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161003133005.h... There's now a genetic test that provides more information about your telomeres: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161005005364/en/TELOYEARS%E2%84%A2%E2%80%94A-Genetic-Test-Reveals-Cellular-Age-Encoded http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161005005364/en/TELO... Gene therapy may add years of life to leukocytes (and follistatin may help those with MS and spinal muscular atrophy): http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45947/title/First-Data-from-Anti-Aging-Gene-Therapy/ http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45947/... Some anti-cancer drugs inhibit telomerase (which keeps telomers long making cancer cells live longer than they should): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160818111454.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160818111454.h... Loss of (T)P53 genes cause increased cancer rate (and elephants that have more P53 genes rarely get cancer)- surprise, surprise- because loss of p53 function accelerates acquisition of telomerase activity: http://www.nature.com/onc/journal/v22/n34/full/1206667a.html http://www.nature.com/onc/journal/v22/n34/full/1206667a.html It seems that, if we don't kill ourselves or die of natural disasters/famines/diseases, we will have a better handle on disease and aging with more study. I don't understand why people would study statistics on aging and conclude that we can't age more than we already do.
- chrisamiller 10y agoMedical research is generally aimed at the most pressing problems facing a society. Infectious disease was a focus for a long time, cancer is one of the biggest targets now. Aging has not been a priority yet, because the vast majority of people die of something else (infections, heart attacks, cancer, etc) before they die of the problems specific to extreme old age. When we develop treatments capable of reducing the incidence of more common diseases, then focus will shift towards aging and the curve may very well start to bend towards longer lifespans. If you want this to occur sooner, support more overall scientific funding through your donations, your votes, and your advocacy.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago> Aging has not been a priority yet, because the vast majority of people die of something else (infections, heart attacks, cancer, etc) before they die of the problems specific to extreme old age. Eh, depends what we mean by "age". My grandma's doctors were quite frightened when she slipped over in the shower -- she broke her leg! And that was just in her 80s! Seems like a degrading resilience and healing ability against injury over time should qualify as a substantial "background problem" negatively impacting health among most adults.
- throwaway_xx9 10y agoHaving known people who lived in misery to 90 and 103 years, why would you want to increase life span exactly? There's no cure for ageing.
- D-Coder 10y ago"Aging has not been a priority yet, because the vast majority of people die of something else..." Also aging is a _very difficult_ problem. We are only now collecting the tools to understand it, much less fix it.
- ebbv 10y agoThis article kinda sucks, and it all should have a big asterisk; on average the longest lived humans will be ~115 unless there is a breakthrough in repairing damaged DNA/RNA. Eventually there will be technology that allows us to repair that damage. It just might not be for a hundred years. But to say that it will never happen is pretty ridiculous.
- marsrover 10y agoI've always found Genesis 6:3 interesting, when talking about human longevity. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
- pboutros 10y agoAm not religious, but that's nuts! Also interesting that Noah and co. all lived to be hundreds of years old, in the book.
- marsrover 10y agoIndeed. However, Noah and co. were born before Genesis 6:3. Also interesting to note.
- kogus 10y agoGenesis 6 is the beginning of the "Noah's flood" narrative. Noah doesn't die until Genesis 9. Reference: http://biblehub.com/genesis/9-29.htm http://biblehub.com/genesis/9-29.htm
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- kogus 10y agoAs with everything biblical, there is an interesting discussion about that very topic: http://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/4163/if-god-set-the-maximum-age-to-120-then-how-could-jacob-be-130-years-old http://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/4163/if-god-...
- Amezarak 10y agoI don't think it's that nuts, it was probably based on observation. There is some evidence that in some relatively primitive cultures that it wasn't completely unheard of to live to very old ages. If you won the genetic, cultural, and geographic lottery and lived somewhere there wasn't a lot of disease-carrying vermin (fleas, mosquitoes, etc), ate a relatively good diet, lived in a time of relative peace, and stayed reasonably active, you probably had a decent shot of living a good, long life. What really drags ancient mortality down is astronomical infant mortality, dying in childbirth, infanticide, and war. In more advanced civilizations, with lots of contact with other peoples, dense cities, sanitation issues, and so on, you then start worrying about plagues. So I think ancient peoples could have reasonably come to the conclusion that about 120 was the maximum age and attributed it to God. Even in recent centuries there have probably been a very few people living to 110-120, the trouble was it was incredibly difficult for us to verify in the absence of solid, verifiable record-keeping.
- wodencafe 10y agoThe statistics in this article are questionable. For one thing, they don't actually analyse what people are dying from. What we consider "natural causes" now, we may discover all sorts of physiological explanations for in the upcoming decades, as we reach new limits of human age. As diseases, disorders, and illnesses are eliminated, we will have less and less "natural" ways to die. This article would have made more sense if they found an actual limit to human age, as the headline implies.
- has2k1 10y agoThe point of the article (and the paper on which it is based) is to infer the existence of a limit. The method of inference is not by pure logic, rather it is partly probabilistic. That is what you have to be comfortable with because all probabilistic/statistical arguments have a similar form. Also worth noting is that what the scientists publish is less than the opinions and convictions they hold. On the age limit question the most popular opinion is that the DNA (specifically the chromosomes) runs out of telomeres, without which the replication process is almost guaranteed to be error prone. With that, it does not matter much what the old people are dying from because anything and everything is going to kill them. Another anecdotal opinion (not sure if there is a paper or not) I have heard is that the blood and marrows of the people in the 110+ age range show that the active stem cells from the systems are nearly depleted. That may or may not be related to the telomores but the consequences are similar, the body will not be able to produce workers for any of the vital/non-vital functions. So anything and everything is going to kill you. When the published papers hint at a limit[1], although may be justified by the content of the paper alone, the authors also do so under the influence extra knowledge and opinions[2]. [1] It can be anything. [2] If you know this sort of thing is happening -- and it is relatively common in scientific papers, you can easily see it. For example, the last sentence of the abstract "... subject to natural constraints." Also last paragraph of the paper hand waves the causes to genetic and cellular systems, but just vague enough so that the paper can stand on its own.
- stcredzero 10y agoI doubt such a study can be valid. We still don't know much about the microorganisms that we exist symbiotically with. Case in point: Cytomegalovirus. Most of us carry this virus. It basically takes up the memory of our immune system, but only slowly over time. As it is now, it's not a concern, but if we had lifespans that were into the mid to upper 100's of years, this thing would probably be a leading cause of death. There's probably a number of things like this we don't know yet. EDIT: It is a concern for AIDS patients and other immune compromised individuals, however.
- djsumdog 10y agoIn the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, the characters live in a fictional world where they have to deal with such issues. Longevity treatments have moved people into very old ages (190 ~ 250 IIRC), but as they age, memories become a huge issue. When they start dying again at very old ages, despite the treatments, it's quite unsettling.
- pdx 10y ago> Cytomegalovirus. Most of us carry this virus. It basically takes up the memory of our immune system, but only slowly over time. Perhaps we can eliminate it from our bodies, in a similar manner to what was done to eliminate HIV in this recent case. https://www.rt.com/uk/361424-british-hiv-patient-cured/ https://www.rt.com/uk/361424-british-hiv-patient-cured/
- kingmanaz 10y agoRather than proving an implicit limit in human lifespan via statistics, these "experts on aging" seem to have instead suggested that increasing cultural diversity has coincided with a decreasing rate of lifespan extension throughout the West.
- issa 10y agoDespite this happening over and over again, I can never understand the attitude underlying statements like the one this article is making. "A computer will never be small enough to fit in a house" "Man will never reach the moon" "The atomic bomb will never work" "The telephone will never catch on" "Heavier than air flight is impossible" "Everything that can be invented has been invented" The list of things declared impossible is as long as it is laughable. I hope I'm around long enough to see this article added to the list.
- koder2016 10y agoThe article was written by an average mind for an average mind, discusses natural humans and considers only nearest future.
- dasil003 10y agoLuckily we have your sublime mind to enlighten the plebs.
- tsotnet 10y agoThe author of this article argues that there exists natural limit to the human longevity, which can not be overcome by current medicine. I don't think this implies that we will never cross that limit by further advancements in technology, such as gene editing.
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- kiba 10y agoThe list of things declared impossible is as long as it is laughable. I hope I'm around long enough to see this article added to the list. There are things that are certainly impossible according to the law of physics as we know it, such as FTL travel or time travel. There is nothing according to the laws of physics that prevent us, say, from colonizing Mars.
- dgudkov 10y agoShouldn't the question be "What's the Longest Humans Can Live Well"?
- Zigurd 10y agoWhat this article is saying in a muddled kind of way is that improvements in "healthspan" can take humans to about 125 years. Beyond that, more radical interventions are required, probably requiring genetic modification. Space travel might drive this as well. Humans who want to travel to and live on Mars will want to be resilient to changes in gravity and to radiation. And once we open the door to genetic modification, longevity becomes one goal among many.
- bluedino 10y agoI'm not sure if they'll live longer but I'd be interested to see how much longer and fuller lives that today's 50 year old men on TRT live
- theothermkn 10y agoVariations on this article are popping up all over today. As far as aging is concerned, I'm just an interested layperson, but there are two things that strike me about the ideas in this article. First, the trope of 115 years, or 120 years or 122 or 125 years, or whatever, as some kind of limit probably survives for a constellation of reasons. It's fun to be able to tell optimists that they're fundamentally wrong. And it's cheap and easy to do so. It's also comforting to not have to wonder if you're missing out on extreme longevity by--I don't know--not exercising enough or not eating your vegetables, or whatever. It also sounds like "a discovery" or a new way of understanding things. So, mimetically, this thing has power. You want to tell people about it, and they want to tell others. They cycle of news continues. But this has no bearing on the claim's predictive value or theoretical foundation. Second, what kind of "natural limit" could this be? We're describing, essentially, a statistical phenomenon, by the author's own admission. Things break over time, and the accumulated damage accelerates further breakage, and then everything gets too broke to continue. That seems to be the idea, to me. But, there isn't anything fundamental about that, to me. It seems like we don't know how to repair things, yet. (This makes the mention of Aubrey de Grey in another one of the articles I saw today especially appalling; de Grey is spurring and funding research in figuring out how to repair the damage of aging.) Every time it is explained that the authors "did research" or "analyzed a database," their sample was drawn from a time when aging was poorly understood, and therapies to target aging were nonexistent. (For example: history up until at least 2016.) This is like pointing to a graph of falling temperature as nightfall approaches and concluding that it is impossible to build a campfire! It's just maddening. <takes deep breath> I have a couple of related observations. 3 scientists just won the Nobel prize for demonstrating synthetic molecular machines. I'm not claiming that this is obviously the answer to aging or will bring it about Real Soon Now, but aren't we, at long last, at least operating at the scale at which the damage from aging occurs? Can't we even imagine new techniques arising from that? Another observation is the work that Aubrey de Grey has been up to, and has been sponsoring and advocating. I would recommend to anyone that they at least look into that. He's at least addressing aging directly, and talking about its biochemical machinery in a focused way. And what about CRISPR/CAS9? Or the more recent CRISPR/Cpf1? Finally, I can't believe that I feel like I need to say this, but "aging" isn't magic. It gets talked about in a very folk-wisdom kind of way, as a bunch of received wisdom about some mystical process. But, some aspects of it have to succumb to some kind of analysis or observation, and the--not entirely unreasonable, I think--hope is that restoring a cell, or an organ, or a person to some approximation of a less time-ravaged state might eventually be within our grasp. To just declare otherwise seems to me to be just rank superstition, an unjustified hypothesis about a field that is beyond one's ken, even if it is not beyond the ken of researchers, present or future, in the field.
- elnado 10y agoFrom the article: "“You’d need 10,000 worlds like ours to have the chance that there would be one human who would become 125 years,” said Dr. Vijg." Apparently, there's a man living who's 145 years old from a reasonably believable source. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/worlds-oldest-person-man-mbah-gotho-indonesia-145-years-old-a7213191.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/worlds-oldest-p...
- romanr 10y agoNobody is mentioning telomeres? That's the key to longevity, the only key. If telomeres can be changed to have their counters not expire that will mean an infinite life.
- mr_overalls 10y agoAny discussion of aging and systematic lifespan extension is incomplete without mentioning the work of the SENS Research Foundation, a research & outreach organization whose goal is to help build the industry that will cure the diseases of aging. They identify seven major classes of cellular and molecular damage that must be remediated in order to defeat aging: http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research
- arisAlexis 10y agoSuch bad science. Since we couldn't make it until now, apparently there is a hard limit. Such a logical flaw