9 ms·

Is Life Expectancy Finally Topping Out?

48 points by headalgorithm 8y ago

midgetjones 8y ago
Never mind the decline in improvement, I think we're going to see a sudden sharp drop very soon. It may be hidden by the long-lived generation before, but the baby boomers have eaten, drunk, and medicated themselves into oblivion compared to their parents. And who knows what's to come for the next generation, with an increasing wealth divide and heck knows what else.
- Aromasin 8y ago
  My parents, baby boomers themselves, are starting to see the effects of this. Funeral after funeral of friends and family dying in their early to late 60's - almost always due to heart disease, liver failure or some sort of cancer. Every time I join them it's the same "he seemed so healthy/ it was so unexpected/ she was gone so quickly". In my head I can't help but think "he ate nothing but meat/ she drank a bottle of wine a night/ they haven't broken a sweat in years".
  - drdeadringer 8y ago
    > dying in their early to late 60's - almost always due to heart disease, liver failure or some sort of cancer In a "Death and Dying" psych class I took in university, the professor remarked how we went from dying from infectious diseases to dying from lifestyle issues. I'm not sure how true or false this is, but when one isn't going to die from the flu you might live long enough to die from consuming too much bacon and alcohol. I'm interested in learning more about this idea.
AstralStorm 8y ago
30% gap between known maximum and highest average is interesting in and of itself. We have barely attacked aging as opposed to diseases of age.
- chmod775 8y ago
  "Aging" is not singular thing. After development, the age of a human body is just an accumulation of many many different kinds of failures over time.
  - mschuster91 8y ago
    And we will be able pretty soon to replace failed organs - anything but the brain itself should be replaceable in 30 years at the latest, I bet. With the progress that is being made right now, I'd say prototypes should exist in a decade, and another 20 years to let the economies of scale work. What has not caught up with reality yet is society: how are people living 100+ years supposed to be financed? Do we expect people to work in their 80s fulltime? Will we be mandating organ replacements for those above a certain age? How are we supposed to feed all those people? It's barely working out right now with current mortality rates and only not collapsing because the rate at which resources like fish are exploited is way beyond the sustainability threshold?
    - nkkollaw 8y ago
      Also, most 100-year-olds are not self-sufficient. If it was the norm be to live to 100 years old we would have a lot of "disabled" people, and even architecturally that would be a problem, no..?
    - wsc981 8y ago
      I feel food production shouldn't really be an issue, of course depending on the food type. But the tiny country of The Netherlands is a huge food exporter [0]. Certainly other countries could learn a thing or two [1] on food production from The Netherlands. --- [0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-... [1]: https://www.wur.nl/en/Education-Programmes/master/MSc-programmes/MSc-Food-Technology.htm https://www.wur.nl/en/Education-Programmes/master/MSc-progra...
      - mschuster91 8y ago
chriselles 8y ago
I remember seeing the horrible decline in life expectancy when the Soviet Union collapsed. At the same time, the Soviet client state of Cuba saw a dramatic reduction in economic activity and caloric restriction. Cuban dietary belt tightening led to a massive reduction in cardio vascular disease with a correlated massive reduction in obesity. I’m not a doctor, nor a data scientist or economist. But I suspect we will see bifurcated life expectancy moving forward. In the distant past when there was great wealth divide, one common denominator was similar life expectancy. Moving forward, that same wealth divide can now be leveraged by those who can afford it to exploit the entire spectrum of longevity incremental opportunities: Nutrition Clean water Clean air Mitigating physical wear & tear Sleep Stress Well being Microbiome Supplements Pharmacology Stem cell therapy Gene therapy CRISPR I predict a continued flattening of average life expectancy as developing world life expectancy slowly improves and some developed countries possibly see some attrition from systemic obesity, economic disruption, and continued wealth divide. But I see the top few % of most wealthy begin to see enhanced quality of life in their later years, as well as incrementally more years. Longevity tech is the ultimate market. How much will people pay for a Tesla Model Y(assuming it makes it to market)? Something. How much will people pay for an extra 5-10 years? Everything. Apologies, social “scientist” talking fiction!
- keiferski 8y ago
  This makes some sense in theory but in actuality people frequently avoid making decisions that would very easily allow them to live years longer. On a deeper level, the notion that humans put “the will to live” above everything else is itself problematic. See Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to live and Nietzsche’s commentary on it.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  >How much will people pay for an extra 5-10 years? Everything. I doubt it, most people aren't even willing to pay the small price of feeling lactic acid when exercising. Or not consuming excess calories. Quality of life matters too. If you have children, I would be surprised if most people would want to spend their personal wealth for an extra 5 to 10 geriatric bed ridden years. It only happens now because the taxpayers pay for it. I'd rather pass those resources onto my kids if it had to come out of my pocket.
wccrawford 8y ago
I don't doubt that we're approaching the max life expectancy that you can get from natural means... By that, I mean curing diseases and maintaining the right balance of nutrition. But I think we'll start to see improvements that aren't about just staying healthy, but instead are about actually reversing "the aging process" and the things we barely understand about what makes us change as we get older.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  We seem to have got a lot worse at nutrition over the last thirty years.
  - ido 8y ago
    I don't know where you were in the 80s but 30 years ago nutrition was as bad or worse than now from my perspective (except in countries that were previously too poor to eat badly) - white bread, lots of sugar, etc - all stuff people nowadays avoid a lot more than my parents' generation did at the time.
    - bostonpete 8y ago
      Well in the US at least there was much less obesity, which I think says something about nutrition, no? I don't think people were particularly more physically active 30 years ago...
      - RankingMember 8y ago
        I think it's both. People were notably more physically active in decades past. "Lower levels of physical activity, both in organized sports and at play, account for a lot of the rest, they say. U.S. health authorities say children should be getting 60 minutes of active play a day, but only one-third are getting that. Children are much less likely to walk, bike or skate to school than they were in the 1970s, at least in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Neighborhoods are increasingly suburban, especially in Asia, and people are driving more. And from the 1970s till now, the number of global households with TVs, VCRs, computers, Internet access and video games has soared." - https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/11/20/246316731/kids-are-less-fit-today-than-you-were-back-then https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/11/20/2463167...
saint_abroad 8y ago
> If we are still far from the limit to the human life-span, then the largest survival gains should be recorded among the oldest people. Trends in outliers cannot be used to extrapolate trends in mean, unless for very small populations (such that outliers are unreliable). The article just seems to be an opinion piece to explain away falling improvements in average life-expectancy rather than tackle rising inequality. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/for-life-expectancy-money-matters/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/for-life-expe... Being poor in the United States is so hazardous to your health, a new study shows, that the average life expectancy of the lowest-income classes in America is now equal to that in Sudan or Pakistan.
alexpotato 8y ago
My grandmother was born in 1912 and live to 97. She: - was born in a time with no antibiotics - lived on a farm with all of it's inherent risks - lived through World War 1 (granted in the United States) - survived the "Spanish Flu" (although as someone under 10 whereas hardest hit were adults) - lived through the Depression - started having children post World War 2 (now with antibiotics available). I've often thought, just making it to age 10 showed that she had a strong immune system. When she started having children, she benefited from having access to antibiotics at a time when there was no drug resistance. Looking at my parents generation (the baby boomers) and suddenly you have a generation of children where infant mortality etc goes way down (again thanks to antibiotics). In other words, children that wouldn't have survived in 1912 are now living into adulthood. We applied selection pressure to have children (and then in turn adults) with weaker immune systems. (Not saying this is a bad thing). Because of the above, I wonder how much of the life expectancy increase has to do with a kind of winning the demographic lottery of: "When I was little, my immune system kept me alive. When I was an adult, medicine took care of what my immune system couldn't."
- matt4077 8y ago
  This doesn’t make much sense because life expectancy cohorts are grouped by the year they are born, not the year they died. The concept of a “strong” vs “weak” immune system also doesn’t correspond to reality: for the flu, it’s hypothesized that it’s too strong an immune reaction that kills you. Many of today’s leading causes of death also don’t have much to do with the immune system, from the opioid epidemic to heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. Autoimmune disease is far ahead as a public health issue compared to infectious disease, from MS to (probably) vascular disease (edit: see this other story currently on the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19742188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19742188)
- phlegmatic 8y ago
  And I think it might be a bit of a double edged sword, but I can't prove it. There are lots of auto-immune disorders, where the immune system is intensely over active, and many a hypothesis is put forward as to why. Having an immune system that reacts to anything and everything is awful. Ask anyone with allergies. And we're left scratching our head at why. Why so many deadly peanut allergies? Latex? Soy? Bees? It used to just be hayfever, but now we need epipens.
DebtDeflation 8y ago
My understanding is that the doubling in life expectancy over the last 150-200 years was primarily due to the drastic reduction in infant mortality and elimination of most infectious diseases. If you only look at life expectancy from the point of reaching adulthood, the change hasn't been nearly as dramatic.
- matt4077 8y ago
  That’s a common “fun fact” but it’s been so overdone people are probably now erring more to the other side. Here’s a graph: http://www.roperld.com/science/graphics/LifeExpectancyForDiffAgesFit.jpg http://www.roperld.com/science/graphics/LifeExpectancyForDif... As an example, in the 20th Century, life expectancy at birth rose from about 40 to 77 years. But for 20 year olds, it also went from 34 to 59 additional years.
  - Retric 8y ago
    That does not seem to be accurate for the US from 1900 looking at a life table. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/lifetables/life1890-1910.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/lifetables/life1890-1910.pdf Page 52 Men in 1900 life expectancy at 20: 42.48 Page 54 Women in 1900 life expectancy at 20: 43.6 The Social Security life table for 2016 lists 56.91 years at 20 a gain of ~13.9 years in the last 116. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      56 looks like a small number compared with other developed countries
      - tgb 8y ago
        It's additional years of life - so 76 total.
- nottorp 8y ago
  And they are falling a bit into that trap: "In 1850, the combined life expectancies of men and women stood at around 40 years in the United States, Canada, Japan and much of Europe." But if you eliminate life expectancy at birth, you'll notice that there hasn't been a drastic improvement. It's been discussed on HN previously, and I think adult life expectancy has only improved by less than 20 years over the last several hundred. (Someone with sources feel free to correct me).
SlipperySlope 8y ago
Who else here believes that AI and life extension are related? If we live long enough we will witness AGI. And if we achieve AGI soon, then it will cure old age.

48 points by headalgorithm 8y ago

Never mind the decline in improvement, I think we're going to see a sudden sharp drop very soon. It may be hidden by the long-lived generation before, but the baby boomers have eaten, drunk, and medicated themselves into oblivion compared to their parents. And who knows what's to come for the next generation, with an increasing wealth divide and heck knows what else.

Aromasin 8y ago
My parents, baby boomers themselves, are starting to see the effects of this. Funeral after funeral of friends and family dying in their early to late 60's - almost always due to heart disease, liver failure or some sort of cancer. Every time I join them it's the same "he seemed so healthy/ it was so unexpected/ she was gone so quickly". In my head I can't help but think "he ate nothing but meat/ she drank a bottle of wine a night/ they haven't broken a sweat in years".
- drdeadringer 8y ago
  > dying in their early to late 60's - almost always due to heart disease, liver failure or some sort of cancer In a "Death and Dying" psych class I took in university, the professor remarked how we went from dying from infectious diseases to dying from lifestyle issues. I'm not sure how true or false this is, but when one isn't going to die from the flu you might live long enough to die from consuming too much bacon and alcohol. I'm interested in learning more about this idea.

AstralStorm 8y ago

30% gap between known maximum and highest average is interesting in and of itself. We have barely attacked aging as opposed to diseases of age.

chmod775 8y ago
"Aging" is not singular thing. After development, the age of a human body is just an accumulation of many many different kinds of failures over time.
- mschuster91 8y ago
  And we will be able pretty soon to replace failed organs - anything but the brain itself should be replaceable in 30 years at the latest, I bet. With the progress that is being made right now, I'd say prototypes should exist in a decade, and another 20 years to let the economies of scale work. What has not caught up with reality yet is society: how are people living 100+ years supposed to be financed? Do we expect people to work in their 80s fulltime? Will we be mandating organ replacements for those above a certain age? How are we supposed to feed all those people? It's barely working out right now with current mortality rates and only not collapsing because the rate at which resources like fish are exploited is way beyond the sustainability threshold?
  - nkkollaw 8y ago
    Also, most 100-year-olds are not self-sufficient. If it was the norm be to live to 100 years old we would have a lot of "disabled" people, and even architecturally that would be a problem, no..?
  - wsc981 8y ago
    I feel food production shouldn't really be an issue, of course depending on the food type. But the tiny country of The Netherlands is a huge food exporter [0]. Certainly other countries could learn a thing or two [1] on food production from The Netherlands. --- [0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-... [1]: https://www.wur.nl/en/Education-Programmes/master/MSc-programmes/MSc-Food-Technology.htm https://www.wur.nl/en/Education-Programmes/master/MSc-progra...
    - mschuster91 8y ago

chriselles 8y ago

I remember seeing the horrible decline in life expectancy when the Soviet Union collapsed. At the same time, the Soviet client state of Cuba saw a dramatic reduction in economic activity and caloric restriction. Cuban dietary belt tightening led to a massive reduction in cardio vascular disease with a correlated massive reduction in obesity. I’m not a doctor, nor a data scientist or economist. But I suspect we will see bifurcated life expectancy moving forward. In the distant past when there was great wealth divide, one common denominator was similar life expectancy. Moving forward, that same wealth divide can now be leveraged by those who can afford it to exploit the entire spectrum of longevity incremental opportunities: Nutrition Clean water Clean air Mitigating physical wear & tear Sleep Stress Well being Microbiome Supplements Pharmacology Stem cell therapy Gene therapy CRISPR I predict a continued flattening of average life expectancy as developing world life expectancy slowly improves and some developed countries possibly see some attrition from systemic obesity, economic disruption, and continued wealth divide. But I see the top few % of most wealthy begin to see enhanced quality of life in their later years, as well as incrementally more years. Longevity tech is the ultimate market. How much will people pay for a Tesla Model Y(assuming it makes it to market)? Something. How much will people pay for an extra 5-10 years? Everything. Apologies, social “scientist” talking fiction!

keiferski 8y ago
This makes some sense in theory but in actuality people frequently avoid making decisions that would very easily allow them to live years longer. On a deeper level, the notion that humans put “the will to live” above everything else is itself problematic. See Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to live and Nietzsche’s commentary on it.
lotsofpulp 8y ago
>How much will people pay for an extra 5-10 years? Everything. I doubt it, most people aren't even willing to pay the small price of feeling lactic acid when exercising. Or not consuming excess calories. Quality of life matters too. If you have children, I would be surprised if most people would want to spend their personal wealth for an extra 5 to 10 geriatric bed ridden years. It only happens now because the taxpayers pay for it. I'd rather pass those resources onto my kids if it had to come out of my pocket.

wccrawford 8y ago

I don't doubt that we're approaching the max life expectancy that you can get from natural means... By that, I mean curing diseases and maintaining the right balance of nutrition. But I think we'll start to see improvements that aren't about just staying healthy, but instead are about actually reversing "the aging process" and the things we barely understand about what makes us change as we get older.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
We seem to have got a lot worse at nutrition over the last thirty years.
- ido 8y ago
  I don't know where you were in the 80s but 30 years ago nutrition was as bad or worse than now from my perspective (except in countries that were previously too poor to eat badly) - white bread, lots of sugar, etc - all stuff people nowadays avoid a lot more than my parents' generation did at the time.
  - bostonpete 8y ago
    Well in the US at least there was much less obesity, which I think says something about nutrition, no? I don't think people were particularly more physically active 30 years ago...
    - RankingMember 8y ago
      I think it's both. People were notably more physically active in decades past. "Lower levels of physical activity, both in organized sports and at play, account for a lot of the rest, they say. U.S. health authorities say children should be getting 60 minutes of active play a day, but only one-third are getting that. Children are much less likely to walk, bike or skate to school than they were in the 1970s, at least in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Neighborhoods are increasingly suburban, especially in Asia, and people are driving more. And from the 1970s till now, the number of global households with TVs, VCRs, computers, Internet access and video games has soared." - https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/11/20/246316731/kids-are-less-fit-today-than-you-were-back-then https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/11/20/2463167...

saint_abroad 8y ago

> If we are still far from the limit to the human life-span, then the largest survival gains should be recorded among the oldest people. Trends in outliers cannot be used to extrapolate trends in mean, unless for very small populations (such that outliers are unreliable). The article just seems to be an opinion piece to explain away falling improvements in average life-expectancy rather than tackle rising inequality. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/for-life-expectancy-money-matters/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/for-life-expe... Being poor in the United States is so hazardous to your health, a new study shows, that the average life expectancy of the lowest-income classes in America is now equal to that in Sudan or Pakistan.

alexpotato 8y ago

My grandmother was born in 1912 and live to 97. She: - was born in a time with no antibiotics - lived on a farm with all of it's inherent risks - lived through World War 1 (granted in the United States) - survived the "Spanish Flu" (although as someone under 10 whereas hardest hit were adults) - lived through the Depression - started having children post World War 2 (now with antibiotics available). I've often thought, just making it to age 10 showed that she had a strong immune system. When she started having children, she benefited from having access to antibiotics at a time when there was no drug resistance. Looking at my parents generation (the baby boomers) and suddenly you have a generation of children where infant mortality etc goes way down (again thanks to antibiotics). In other words, children that wouldn't have survived in 1912 are now living into adulthood. We applied selection pressure to have children (and then in turn adults) with weaker immune systems. (Not saying this is a bad thing). Because of the above, I wonder how much of the life expectancy increase has to do with a kind of winning the demographic lottery of: "When I was little, my immune system kept me alive. When I was an adult, medicine took care of what my immune system couldn't."

matt4077 8y ago
This doesn’t make much sense because life expectancy cohorts are grouped by the year they are born, not the year they died. The concept of a “strong” vs “weak” immune system also doesn’t correspond to reality: for the flu, it’s hypothesized that it’s too strong an immune reaction that kills you. Many of today’s leading causes of death also don’t have much to do with the immune system, from the opioid epidemic to heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. Autoimmune disease is far ahead as a public health issue compared to infectious disease, from MS to (probably) vascular disease (edit: see this other story currently on the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19742188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19742188)
phlegmatic 8y ago
And I think it might be a bit of a double edged sword, but I can't prove it. There are lots of auto-immune disorders, where the immune system is intensely over active, and many a hypothesis is put forward as to why. Having an immune system that reacts to anything and everything is awful. Ask anyone with allergies. And we're left scratching our head at why. Why so many deadly peanut allergies? Latex? Soy? Bees? It used to just be hayfever, but now we need epipens.

DebtDeflation 8y ago

My understanding is that the doubling in life expectancy over the last 150-200 years was primarily due to the drastic reduction in infant mortality and elimination of most infectious diseases. If you only look at life expectancy from the point of reaching adulthood, the change hasn't been nearly as dramatic.

matt4077 8y ago
That’s a common “fun fact” but it’s been so overdone people are probably now erring more to the other side. Here’s a graph: http://www.roperld.com/science/graphics/LifeExpectancyForDiffAgesFit.jpg http://www.roperld.com/science/graphics/LifeExpectancyForDif... As an example, in the 20th Century, life expectancy at birth rose from about 40 to 77 years. But for 20 year olds, it also went from 34 to 59 additional years.
- Retric 8y ago
  That does not seem to be accurate for the US from 1900 looking at a life table. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/lifetables/life1890-1910.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/lifetables/life1890-1910.pdf Page 52 Men in 1900 life expectancy at 20: 42.48 Page 54 Women in 1900 life expectancy at 20: 43.6 The Social Security life table for 2016 lists 56.91 years at 20 a gain of ~13.9 years in the last 116. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    56 looks like a small number compared with other developed countries
    - tgb 8y ago
      It's additional years of life - so 76 total.
nottorp 8y ago
And they are falling a bit into that trap: "In 1850, the combined life expectancies of men and women stood at around 40 years in the United States, Canada, Japan and much of Europe." But if you eliminate life expectancy at birth, you'll notice that there hasn't been a drastic improvement. It's been discussed on HN previously, and I think adult life expectancy has only improved by less than 20 years over the last several hundred. (Someone with sources feel free to correct me).

SlipperySlope 8y ago

Who else here believes that AI and life extension are related? If we live long enough we will witness AGI. And if we achieve AGI soon, then it will cure old age.