Researchers say it is probable that people alive today will live to be 125. Not many, but some.
And some are already nudging this grand age.
Kane Tanaka, who lives in an aged care home in Higashi-Ku, Fukuoka, on Japan’s third largest island, had her 118th birthday on 2 January. She is the oldest person in the world and reportedly healthy.
The person to have lived the longest is Jeanne Calment of Arles, which is 746km south of the capital Paris, in France. Ms Calment was 122 when she died on 4 August 1997.
New research, which was published in Demographic Research on 30 June, by the University of Washington believes that a lifespan of 125 years or 130 years will be possible by the end of the century as humanity continues to have longer lifespans.
“People are fascinated by the extremes of humanity, whether it’s going to the moon, how fast someone can run in the Olympics, or even how long someone can live,” said lead author Michael Pearce, a UW doctoral student in statistics.
“With this work, we quantify how likely we believe it is that some individual will reach various extreme ages this century.”
Longevity has ramifications for governments and economic policies, as well as individuals’ own health care and lifestyle decisions, rendering what’s probable, or even possible, relevant at all levels of society.
With ongoing research into ageing, the prospects of future medical and scientific discoveries and the relatively small number of people to have verifiably reached age 110 or older, experts have debated the possible limits to what is referred to as the maximum reported age at death.
Pearce and Adrian Raftery, a professor of sociology and of statistics at the UW, used Bayesian statistics, a common tool in modern statistics, to ascertain that the world record of 122 years almost certainly will be broken, with a strong likelihood of at least one person living to anywhere between 125 and 132 years.
To calculate the probability of living past 110 – and to what age – Adrian Raftery, a professor of sociology and of statistics at the UW, and Pearce turned to the International Database on Longevity, created by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. That database tracks supercentenarians from 10 European countries, plus Canada, Japan and the US.
Using a Bayesian approach to estimate probability, the UW team created projections for the maximum reported age at death in all 13 countries from 2020 through 2100.
Among their findings:
- Researchers estimated near 100% probability that the current record of maximum reported age at death — Calment’s 122 years, 164 days — will be broken;
- The probability remains strong of a person living longer, to 124 years old (99% probability) and even to 127 years old (68% probability);
- An even longer lifespan is possible but much less likely, with a 13% probability of someone living to age 130;
- It is “extremely unlikely” that someone would live to 135 in this century.
People who achieve extreme longevity are still rare enough that they represent a select population, Raftery said. Even with population growth and advances in health care, there is a flattening of the mortality rate after a certain age. In other words, someone who lives to be 110 has about the same probability of living another year as, say, someone who lives to 114, which is about one-half.
“It doesn’t matter how old they are, once they reach 110, they still die at the same rate,” Raftery said.
I’ve got wrinkles now, I can’t imagine how many I’d have if I hit 100, let alone 120 years.
