Scientists seek investment in gero-science for health, life extension

Despite medical advances, healthier diets, medical advances and other quality-of-life improvements, the rate at which life expectancy increases has slowed considerably over the last 30 years after nearly doubling during the 20th century.

According to a study led by the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), life expectancy at birth in the world’s longest-living populations has increased only an average of six and a half years since 1990 despite frequent breakthroughs in medicine and public health.

The authors said the rate of improvement falls far short of some scientists’ expectations that life expectancy would increase at an accelerated pace in this century and that most people born today will live past 100 years.

The lead author and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, School of Public Health, UIC, Jay Olshansky, expressed concern that the biggest advancement to longevity has already occurred through successful efforts to combat disease.

leaving the damaging effects of ageing as the main obstacle to further extension. He called for more investment into gero-science (the biology of ageing), which may hold the seeds of the next wave of health and life extension.

Olshansky warned that extending life expectancy even more by reducing disease could be harmful, especially if those additional years aren’t healthy and urged for a shift in focus towards efforts to slow ageing and extend.

“Most people alive today at older ages are living on time that was manufactured by medicine, but these medical Band-Aids are producing fewer years of life even though they’re occurring at an accelerated pace, implying that the period of rapid increases in life expectancy is now documented to be over,” he added.

Conducted with other researchers from the University of Hawaii, Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, the report is the latest chapter in a three-decade debate over the potential limits of human longevity.

Although a published paper in Science by Olshansky in 1990 argued that humans were approaching a ceiling for life expectancy of around 85 years of age and that the most significant increase had already been made, most other researchers predicted that advances in medicine and public health would accelerate 20th-century trends upward into the 21st century.

Now in 2024, evidence reported in the Nature Aging study supports the idea that life expectancy gains will continue to slow as more people become exposed to the detrimental and immutable effects of aging.

The paper known as “Implausibility of Radical Life Extension in Humans in the 21st Century,” offers new evidence that humans are approaching a biologically based limit to life with data from the eight longest-living countries.

Olshansky also noted that the result proves that modern medicine is yielding incrementally smaller improvements in longevity even though advancements are occurring at breakneck speed.

He added that while more people may reach 100 years and beyond in this century, those cases will remain outliers that won’t move average life expectancy significantly higher.

Although the finding doesn’t rule out that medicine and science can produce further benefits, the professor argued that there may be more immediate potential in improving the quality of life at older ages instead of extending life.

“There’s plenty of room for improvement; for reducing risk factors, working to eliminate disparities and encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles and all of which can enable people to live longer and healthier. We can push through this glass health and longevity ceiling with gero-science and efforts to slow the effects of ageing,” Olshansky added.

The report pushes back against products and industries, such as insurance and wealth-management businesses, which increasingly make calculations based on assumptions that most people will live to be 100. The professor said it is profoundly bad advice because only a small percentage of the population will live that long in this century.