You’ve likely seen the headlines when the oldest known person passes away (at age 114 or even older), or maybe you’ve seen published interviews when someone celebrates a birthday well into her 100s. And we have “biohackers,” those wealthy and seemingly eccentric individuals who spend thousands of dollars and hours tracking their health and experimenting with all means available to try to extend the length of their health spans and lives beyond normal human limits. But what are those human limits? Is living to 100+ going to be the new norm? Should we all expect that we can live well beyond the current limits if we do some planning and lifestyle alterations? 

This week some new scientific data appeared to bring the discussion of what’s possible for human life expectancy back down to earth. In a study published in Nature Aging, researchers examined increases in life expectancy in the populations of 8 of the longest-living countries, plus the United States and Hong Kong. They analyzed data to see if trends from earlier decades (which showed an increase in life expectancy of about 3 years gained per decade) are still going strong. In the late 19th century the global life expectancy was 30 years old. In 2021, it was 71 years old. How were those tremendous advances in life expectancy obtained? They were largely due to public health innovations, including sanitation and clean water, along with antibiotics, vaccines, and health care improvements, especially for young children.  However the benefits from those technological and medical advances have now been captured, and the exponential growth of human life expectancy has begun to slow down. It appears that 3 years of growth per decade largely disappeared when looking at data from 1990-2019 and that going forward, it’s unrealistic to expect populations to continue to significantly push the boundaries of human life expectancy unless we figure out how to stop the aging process. As was made clear in an article in STAT describing this research, “Many of the simplest and most obvious ways to increase life expectancy have already been addressed.”

So while there may be more centenarians going forward due to the population growth of the Baby Boomers, the reality is that living to 100+ will not likely be possible for most humans, at least with our current ability to understand and intervene in the aging process. The study found that children born since 2010 have a relatively small chance of living to 100 (it’s estimated the chance is 5.1% for females and 1.89% for males). The lead author of this study, Dr. S. Jay Olshansky, estimates that the maximum life expectancy for men going forward will be approximately 84 years old, while for women it will be approximately 90 years old. Right now it still appears that even if we can treat and cure some of the major chronic diseases, such as diabetes or cancer, we still bump up against the fact that internal organs and bodily systems appear to have a type of expiration date for which we have yet to find a workaround. As Dr. Olshansky told Scientific American, “Our bodies don’t operate well when you push them beyond their warranty period.” For more on this important new study, put aside your calendar and click here.

Yet not all scientists are as pessimistic as this study may suggest and some continue to believe that we can better understand and address human biological aging, which could then push us past current life expectancy limits. While acknowledging that there is much work to be done to extend the human “health span” (years of living healthy) rather than the life span (the maximum length of life), renowned aging experts such as Nir Barzilai believe that human life expectancy can still be pushed to a figure closer to 115, depending upon how well we learn to slow down biological aging in the coming decades and how much funding we put into accelerating our understanding. But Dr. Barzilai also strongly agrees that individuals themselves can make significant progress in expanding health spans with such basics as exercise, nutrition, and stress management. He also believes that a combination of precision medicine, artificial intelligence, and gerotherapeutics (drugs to target the underlying process of aging) will help push boundaries. One of those possible drugs could be metformin. Another possible drug? Rapamycin, a drug typically given to those who receive organ donation, but it is also thought to play a role in delaying the aging process. Click here to read more about the potential of rapamycin to help us further push the boundaries of human life expectancy. And remember, even at this moment, you do have some control over creating and maintaining a long health span.