How long can people live? New study suggests there’s a limit

LOS ANGELES:

Just how long can people live? New research suggests there may be a limit to our life span - one that’s hard to extend without some sort of breakthrough that fixes all age-related problems. The record for the world’s oldest person is 122 years and the odds of shattering that record are slim, according to an analysis published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“It seems extremely difficult if not impossible to break through that ceiling due to the complexity of the aging process,” one of the researchers, Jan Vijg, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, said in an email. Life expectancies in many countries have risen dramatically because of improvements in medical care and sanitation in the last century. The maximum age of death has also increased, leading some to believe that there’s no boundary to how long people can live.

In the new study, researchers analyzed mortality data from a global database. They found that while there have been strides in reducing deaths among certain groups - children, women during childbirth and the elderly - the rate of improvement was slower for the very old, those over 100 years old. Next they examined how old centenarians were when they died. The record holder is Jeanne Calment, of France, who lived until 122 years old. Since her death in 1997, no one has broken her record. —AP