THE the world population is aging because life expectancy has increased thanks to several factors such as advances in medicine, less physically demanding jobs, fewer war conflicts… but also because people are more aware of the importance of health and monitor their diet more and spend more time exercising.
Although, life expectancy increasesAccording to science, this has a limit, that is, an age that theoretically cannot be exceeded. We can live longer and longer, but we are not eternal and death always catches up with us eventually.
At the end of the 18th century, biologists calculated that a healthy person who had not suffered any accidents or the disease could live up to 100 years at most. At that time, centenarians were very rare.
However, with the improvement of living conditions and advances in medicine, assumptions about the maximum length of human life They reached the figures of 110, 115 then 120 yearsas highlighted by INED (National Institute of Demographic Studies). In 1997, a new milestone was reached when Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment celebrated her 122nd birthday. She holds the record for human longevity.
Thanks to their knowledge of genetics and the mechanisms of aging, scientists do not rule out the possibility of living much longer. In the journal Nature, Researchers in Singapore attempted to predict the limit of human life expectancy.
They studied aging trajectories through blood tests and physical activity levels of large numbers of US and UK citizens. They discovered that with age, the human body’s ability to recover from stress (illnesses, health problems) increases. This is called “resilience”. In psychology describes the ability to live despite adversity and to overcome it, get back on the path to life after the trauma.
This resilience demonstrates the human body’s ability to recover after stress. From two weeks when you are 40 years old, it is extended to six weeks when you are 80 years old, on average. Beyond 120 to 150 years, Humans would completely lose their resilience. This estimate would be our biological limit.
This discovery represents a major breakthrough because it determines the role of fundamental factors (in this case resistance capacity) in human longevity and explains why “even the most effective prevention and treatment of age-related diseases could not than improve hope.” average life expectancy but not maximum life expectancy, unless real anti-aging therapies are developed,” says Andrei Gudkov, co-author of a study on aging and co-founder of Genome Protection, a biotechnology company specializing in anti-aging therapies.
