4 ms·
Trying to understand why someone lived this long is something of a pointless endeavor. It is random chance, plus a little genetics. If genes double your odds of
by reasonattlm 10y ago
Trying to understand why someone lived this long is something of a pointless endeavor. It is random chance, plus a little genetics. If genes double your odds of making it past 100, then that is still 2% odds for people reaching that age now. By 117, with ~50%+ yearly mortality past 110, well, the odds are not good whatever your diet and past lifestyle might have been.
Running around analyzing the genetics of supercentenarians isn't really all that useful from the point of view of making people live longer. Doubling a tiny chance is still a tiny chance, and their longevity has a lot more to do with randomness than with anything else.
Perhaps more interesting is asking why these people die, what are the causes. Different ages are characterized by a different prevalence of disease; cancer hits a maximum mortality rate and then fades as a major cause in the oldest old, for example. From the few autopsies performed, supercentenarians appear to predominantly die of senile systemic amyloidosis, a clogging of the cardiovascular system with misfolded transthyretin that appears to play a lesser role in heart failure in younger old age.
If we want to ask why human life span seems to have a rough upper limit (though 50%+ yearly mortality for any combination of causes is going to look a lot like a hard limit when stretched over 20 years), then this form of amyloidosis seems to be one of the places to look.
Interestingly, this form of amyloidosis has an inherited version that shows up in young people, so despite the institutional reluctance to work on medicine to treat the causes of aging, there are actually a number of therapies in development and trials, some of which can selectively remove this form of amyloid. At some point the research community will wake up to this form of amyloid being a contributing cause of heart failure (a process underway judging by recent papers on the topic), at which point we might well see a leap in the observed upper limit to human life in the decades following more widespread use.
- Strom 10y agoIt is random chance, plus a little genetics. Looking at the top 43 oldest people alive [1] I can see that 20 of them are from Japan. That's almost 50%! While not conclusive proof, I think it at the very least heavily suggests that living long isn't about random chance. Whatever is going on in Japan seems to be working very well. -- [1] http://www.grg.org/SC/WorldSCRankingsList.html http://www.grg.org/SC/WorldSCRankingsList.html
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- chrischen 10y agoJapan has a higher standard of living.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Strom 10y agoWhat definition of standard of living do you have in mind? I know of several and Japan doesn't lead in all of them. What's even more important is that even the definitions where Japan leads it doesn't do so by as big of a margin as it does in the extremes of human longevity. Take Switzerland for example. It also has a high standard of living, and ranks #2 just after Japan in average life expectancy. [1] Yet there's not a single Swiss person in that top 43 oldest people list. Of course Switzerland has a much smaller population (8M) than Japan (127M). However we can use a combination of countries. Let's take the top 10 countries by average life expectancy. The first is Japan with its 127M people, and the other 9 (Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, Spain, Iceland, Italy, Israel, Sweden, France) have a combined population of 227M people. Yet even with almost double the population, in regards to the top 43 oldest people, this combination only gives us 6 entries (France 3, Italy 2, Spain 1) against Japan's 20. A high standard of living certainly has an effect, but I feel it barely scratches the surface of the full answer. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
- melling 10y agoI guess you've never heard of Blue Zones? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
- SamReidHughes 10y agoJapan didn't 70+ years ago.