> As a result, I think the current crop of people who are alive are among the first to see the effects of truly advanced age. You’re mistaking average for medi

> As a result, I think the current crop of people who are alive are among the first to see the effects of truly advanced age. You’re mistaking average for median life expectancy. People lived to older ages in the past. But lots of babies died, so the average life expectancy was way down. Add a lot of zeros to a number series and it gets pretty low. Ancient comedy even had a stock character, sexex iratus: angry old man. Certainly there are many more very old people now, but it wasn’t something totally unknown. The aging of people has also coincided with a decline in our physical health and diets. Strength is declining year on year: we have grip strength measures for college age students since the 1980s and it is a steady decline. Diets are worse, people are much fatter and with more health problems such as type 2 diabetes. One of the theories of alzheimers is that it is a form of diabetes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2769828/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2769828/ Certainly it is correlated with type 2 diabetes, and with obesity in mid life. (Not in late life, but this may be because sudden weight loss is a precursor of alzheimers https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6205180/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6205180/) Have a look at this chart. Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world, and yet its alzheimers death rate is less than 6x that of the usa: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alzheimers-dementia/by-country/ https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alzheimer... There is more to this than just age. Our lifestyles increasingly leave us hobbled by ailments at young ages, and the medical system patches it up and lets us live through them longer. But this expresses in much more old age morbidity than would otherwise be biologically necessary.