According to science, there is a limit to the human lifespan, in other words, an age that theoretically cannot be exceeded.
Human life expectancy continues to increase in France. If we live older and older, we are not eternal and death always ends up catching up with us. At the end of the 18th century, biologists estimated that a healthy person who had not suffered any accident or suffered from any disease could live 100 years, no more. And at that time, centenarians were very rare. However, with the improvement of living conditions and the progress of medicine, the hypotheses on the maximum duration of human life had to be pushed back to 110, 115 then 120 years, recalls theIned. In 1997, a new milestone was reached when Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment celebrated her 122nd birthday. She holds the record for human longevity.
Thanks to knowledge of genetics and aging mechanisms, scientists do not rule out the possibility of living much longer. In the Nature magazineresearchers in Singapore attempted to predict the limit of human lifespan. They studied the aging trajectories – including blood tests and physical activity levels – of large numbers of American and English people. They realized that with age, the human body’s ability to recover after stress (illness, health problem) was longer and longer. This is called “resilience”.
This resilience is on average 2 weeks at 40 years old, it is extended to 6 weeks from 80 years old and to more than 8 weeks at 90 years old. In other words, “as we age, it takes longer and longer to recover from a disruption, and we spend less and less time close to optimal physiological state,” explains Timothy Pyrkov, the author of the study. Beyond a certain age, humans completely lose their capacity for resilience, even in the absence of chronic illnesses. “Resilience would ultimately be lost at the critical point at an age between 120 and 150 years, thus indicating the absolute limit of human lifespan“, report the researchers.
This discovery marks a major breakthrough because it determines the roles of fundamental factors (here, resilience) in human longevity and explains why even the most effective prevention and treatment of age-related diseases could only improve the average lifespan, but not the maximum lifespan “unless real anti-aging therapies are one day developed“, conclude the researchers in a press release.