Its growth rate life expectancy has slowed significantly over the past three decades, despite medical advances, according to a study led by the University of Illinois at Chicago published in the journal Nature Aging.

Medical advances, healthy diets, and other improvements in the quality of life led to a huge increase in life expectancy during the 19th and 20th centuries, doubling in the 20th century.

However, since 1990 life expectancy among the world’s longest-lived populations has increased by just 6.5 years on average, according to the study. This rate falls well short of expectations some scientists that life expectancy would increase at an accelerating rate this century and that most people born today will live over 100 years.

The investigation

The researchers studied data from the nine countries with the highest life expectancy today (Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain), as well as the US, one of the few countries that saw a decline of life expectancy during the study period.

The research team provides evidence, according to which humans are approaching a biologically established life limit. The greatest increases in longevity have already occurred through the fight against disease, yet the deleterious effects of aging remain the main obstacle to further extension.

As it turns out, children born in recent years have a relatively low chance of reaching 100 years of life (5.3% chance for women and 1.8% chance for men. The highest chance of children born in 2019 reaching at age 100 was found in Hong Kong, where 12.8% of women and 4.4% of men are expected to reach that age, compared to 3.1% for women and 1.3% in the US % for men.

“Most people living to older ages today are living in a time manufactured by Medicine. But these medical patches are producing fewer life years, even though they are occurring at an accelerating rate, meaning that the period of rapid increases in life expectancy is now demonstrably over,” notes the study’s lead author, Jay Olshansky of the School of Public Health. of the University of Illinois. “We should now turn our attention to efforts that slow aging and extend the spectrum of health,” he adds.