New study caps maximum human lifespan at 150 years

A new study has investigated how far the human body can push the limits of longevity. The research was published in Nature Communications on May 25. Aging is a progressive functional decline that leads to chronic age-related diseases and disease-specific mortality. Over the last few decades, researchers from around the world have intensified efforts to find interventions that could be used in clinical practice to either delay or reverse this inevitable process. Renewed efforts over the last few years have seen Silicon Valley billionaires fund anti-aging research and initiatives. Many experts agree that the dream of longevity may be within reach, but it is not clear how long it’ll take before aging can be targeted and treated like any other disease. Researchers based in Singapore aimed to determine the maximum life expectancy that the human body can support. The goal was to determine how long we could push the envelope, given a stress-free environment and assuming that you did not die from the usual causes of mortality. The scientists studied data from three large cohorts in the US, U.K, and Russia. They used changes in blood cell counts and physical activity (steps count) by age group to evaluate deviations from stable health. The team — which included researchers in Moscow and Buffalo, NY, realized that for both the step counts and blood cell counts, the pattern was the same as age increased. A factor beyond disease caused an incremental reduction of the body’s ability to recover after a disruption. This explains why a healthy young person recovers rapidly from downtime while an older person has a hard time restoring a personal norm following a disruption such as illness. “We observed a steep turn at about the age of 35 to 40 years that was quite surprising, an indication that something in physiology may really be changing at this age,” said Peter Fedichev, a study co-author and co-founder of Singapore-based anti-aging startup Gero. This perhaps explains why most sports athletes’ careers end at around this age. The team determined that omitting the things that usually kill us, the body’s capacity to restore equilibrium to its structural and metabolic processes after disruptions diminished with age. This essentially points to an underlying ‘pace of aging’ or ‘fundamental loss of resilience’ that determines the upper limit for human lifespan. The researchers put the ceiling for longevity at between 120 and 150 years. The oldest known person to ever walk the earth was Jeanne Calment, who died over 20 years ago at the age of 122 years and 164 days — well within the study’s range. The findings of this research perhaps suggest that researchers should focus on living healthier longer rather than just living longer. But as the longevity and gerontology industry intensifies, it may be just a matter of time before the lifespan limit specified in this study drives up.