Why humans will never live past age of 125

AS life expectancies rise, you might think that humans will continue to live longer and longer with every passing generation.

But it appears there is an upper limit to how long any of us could ever survive.

Scientists now believe that the human body has a maximum age limit of 125 years.

No one has lived longer than 122 – the age reached by Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment in 1997.

And researchers think this demonstrates there is a cut-off point to ageing which has remained stubbornly consistent.

The increases in life expectancy over the last century have led to questions over whether there is a limit to how long humans could live.

But scientists from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have argued that if there was no limit, we would see an onward march of ever older people – which has not happened.

To test the theory, they analysed the International Database on Longevity, which has recorded the age of death from people in 41 countries between 1968 and 2006. They found that people do keep living longer – but only up to a point. Lead researcher, Jan Vijg said: ‘The rate of improvement in survival peaks and then declines for very old age levels which points towards diminishing gains in reduction of late-life mortality and a possible limit to human lifespan.

‘In contrast to previous suggestions that human longevity can be extended ever further, our data strongly suggest that the duration of life is limited.’

The group said there had been a huge boost in life expectancy rates in the past 150 years, largely thanks to reductions of deaths in childbirth and infancy. But they added that ‘improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and the age of the world’s oldest person at death has not increased since the 1990s.’

Their findings, published in the journal Nature, were supported by maximum age of death figures in the Gerontological Research Group’s database, which has recorded deaths from 1972 to 2015.

This database showed that each year, the maximum recorded age of death for those from countries on the database had ‘plateaued’ in 1994 at an average of 114, and had slightly decreased since then.

The researchers said 125 was an upper limit but stressed even that would be rare.

They estimated the likelihood of anyone going further than Jeanne Calment, and recording a maximum age of 125 was a one in 10,000 years chance.

Mrs Calment had reached a remarkable age of 122 years and 164 days when she died in 1997.

She greatly outlived her husband, who died at 73, and only gave up cycling when she was 100. She smoked two cigarettes a day.

As a girl of 13, in her hometown of Arles, she recalled selling pencils to Vincent Van Gogh, who lived nearby. She described him as ‘dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable’.

The UK, France, Japan and the US have the most supercentenarians – people aged 110 years or more. Average life expectancy is 81.5 years in the UK.

There have been 134 verified supercentenarians from the United Kingdom.

The oldest living person in the United Kingdom is Bessie Camm from Rotherham, who was born on June 20, 1904. She is now 112 years old.

‘The duration of life is limited’