Why it may be time for scientists to focus on keeping people healthy for longer

Humans will not see the same dramatic increases in longevity this century that happened over the past 100 years because people are now living so long that they reach a point where the ageing process cannot be overcome, a new global analysis has concluded.

It said that rather than trying to keep people alive for longer, medical advances should instead focus on helping people live healthy lives for longer.

The researchers behind the study found that Hong Kong was a “longevity outlier”, with 12.8 per cent of females and 4.4 per cent of males born in 2019 expected to reach the age of 100. This compares with an average probability of 5.1 per cent of females and 1.8 per cent of males reaching that age over the 10 populations surveyed.

These included the eight countries with the longest-living populations – Australia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland – and the United States.

“Our analysis suggests that survival to age 100 years is unlikely to exceed 15 per cent for females and 5 per cent for males, altogether suggesting that, unless the processes of biological ageing can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century,” the team wrote in an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Aging on Monday.

“In every population, including Hong Kong, the most recent decade of change in life expectancy is slower than it was in the last decade of the 20th century.”