Today's old folks set to smash through longevity records Boffins working on a mathematical model to predict future human lifespans say that longevity records may be broken by 2060 – and the sky's the limit from there. They don't think we've even approached the ceiling of how long a well cared-for human can live. Those born between 1910 and 1950 – the next cohort to reach "advanced …
Modern medicine is focused on not letting one die and not allowing people to die. Its extent depends highly on local, cultural, social and legal traditions. But death has become taboo in many "western" type societies. Many have laws that result in a rule that "forbid" you to die, regardless well being. Another situation is when family cannot "cope" with death and don't allow you to die.
We have outsourced caring for the elderly, putting them in homes for old people. We do no longer experience the problems associated with old age because we have sent the old ones to homes.
It is an interesting question to ask what modern medicine is focused on. My experience is that it is on educating individuals about what their requests for limits of treatment actually mean. Unfortunately most people only have that conversation when they or their loved one is in extremis.
One could argue that if you become old enough to need a retirement home, modern medicine has already done for you everything it possibly can. Once you're in need of that kind of support, the best resuscitative and critical care medicine is, at best, life prolonging at the cost of dependency for even the most basic activities of daily living. Most people who know the statistics on dependency post-resuscitation and post-intensive care would ask not to be resuscitated after about the age of 50.
As stated in the original article, the big leaps in quality of life survival come from public health. Two signal failures in the US are their public health approaches to diseases of affluence and the pandemic.
Modern medicine will do what is asked of it by society, including education and health promotion. Overcoming society's hangups about freedoms and ethical inhibitions is society's job.
I am so glad that my younger brother had a medical team that was focused on my brother's well being when he got cancer.
They treated him with chemotherapy as he had a faitly straight forward lymphoma. He responded really well.
Until he started having problems walking and they discovered a second cancer had appeared in his spinal fluid and brain. Unfortunately he didn't respond to the new chemo and the cancer was paralyzing him slowly as it moved from the feet upwards.
The doctors were very honest with me, him, and his wife. They said they could continue the chemo and hope it eventually works, or make him comfortable for his final weeks.
He chose to be made comfortable and was able to see and talk to family and friends in his hospital room right up until he died a week later.
He was holding his wife's hand when he slipped away.
I will always be grateful he had such a great team looking after him.
A team who card more about him than about stats.
That's why a lot of research is refocusing on what they call "Healthspan", not "Lifespan", i.e. extending the period of healthy life. Several surveys have confirmed that people aren't too fussed specially with living (much) longer, but they'd rather be healthier, active and alert during the time they do have,
So researchers surmised that keeping people alive when they're in bad health, suffering, immobile or dependent on others for daily functioning, is counter productive or even "torture".
It's better to work towards improving quality of life. A side-effect might well be that whatever we do to remain healthy and alert, also feeds into us living longer. Bonus.
All this also up-ends a lot of social contracts around age of retirement. We're close to where our "retired" life time matches our economic productive life time. There's only so much compound interest can do to build retirement/pension funds.
My Godmother developed cancer. The Docs offered her chemo to extend her life. When she asked about the quality of life, they got rather nervous, then admitted it wouldn't be all that great.
So she refused the treatment, which would have added three or four years to her life (estimated). Instead she carried on volunteering with the community work she volunteered for, and was teaching arts at college for evening classes, and generally enjoying her final years.
She'd been at the local Church Hall helping set up for an event. Walked out the door, had a heart attack, was gone in moments. Active right to the end, helping people and the community. And they wanted to put her on chemo for her cancer and take all that away from her? She was nearly Ninety when she died.
Shows that medical treatment isn't always worth the effort. Much better to live a good life, have fun, and slide into the grave with a drink in one hand and a party popper in the other yelling 'here we go!'
Arguably the health span has also risen.
I know it is anecdotal, but try to compare the life and activities of someone in their 70es or 80es today with their parents generation. My mum is mid 80es and in my grandmothers' generation that was positively ancient, my mum & friends don't seem to have discovered yet.
Because that's something you can measure, and medicine has had problems with false claims made on the basis of unmeasurable things. Also aiming for keeping people alive as long as possible often (not always) has a side effect of keeping them well - the newer chemotherapy drugs used when my cancer came back for a second go were more effective (the cancer went away faster and hasn't yet come back again) and had less unpleasant side effects than those used the first time.
"Yes, I read that Ireland has the highest life expectancy in the EU, according to The Health in Ireland: Key Trends 2022 report by the Department of Health. Having a big fry up as soakage really helps."
I imagine a pint of Guiness could lift paint so atherosclerotic plaque would be a doddle. :)
I suspect those nations with a fairly broad easy going sense of humour fair better in these league tables. The hanging offense of the wokery is its singular lack of anything resembling a sense of humour--positively unhuman IMHO.
The Irish custom of having a wake with the guest of honour in the room would help normalize death. The comedian Dave Allen had a story incidentally involved the deceased being taken to the pub by his cronies one last time...
No great surprise then that the life expectancy of the denizens of the superpower is going backwards - a society of humorless death denyers (bugrit - deniers are for women's hosiery.)
>So the neoliberal paradises of the USA & UK have static or falling life expectancy whilst in the socialist paradises of Western Europe (ex UK) it continues to rise. I wonder why that is?
You have to be a little careful about statistics. My city has about the highest life expectancy on the continent - it also has the highest S.E. Asian population, moving here from NY doesn't suddenly make you live to 100, unless you also become a Japanese grandmother.
And overall life expectancy is heavily weighted by childhood mortality, rules on how a still birth is counted, or at what date a miscarriage counts as a still birth have a big effect, It's going to interesting if certain states start counting all miscarriages as deaths with an age of -0.75
But mostly diet and lifestyle, although remember it's what diet and lifestyle was when those old people were young. Today's fat teenagers don't affect today's life expectancy. A lot of the reason for the USA/UK's health being crap is that they were crap 30-40 years ago, when a lot of Europe was less crap. Don't expect today's French / Italian teenagers to have the same diet/lifestyle as their grandparents.
Life expectancy from birth has fallen slightly in recent years for men, and is static for women. Another source:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/bulletins/nationallifetablesunitedkingdom/2018to2020
“Life expectancy at birth in the UK in 2018 to 2020 was 79.0 years for males and 82.9 years for females; this represents a fall of 7.0 weeks for males and almost no change for females (a slight increase of 0.5 weeks) from the latest non-overlapping period of 2015 to 2017.”
"Life expectancy from birth" is a subtly different metric, and not what TFA was discussing. According to the World Bank - the agency I found that tries to track this value internationally - this number has fallen for many developed countries between those dates, including Germany, Italy and Sweden.
And here in the UK, there are a group who want to push us in to your delightful US model of healthcare. Our life expectancy is the 2nd worst in the G7 - behind the US.
The unfortunate thing is that, normally, you would expect me to point at the Tories for it but oh no. Labour are just as bad, and Sir Beer Korma and others have been receiving donations from people who work in the private health care sector.
"Sir Beer Korma..."
ROFLMAO Excellent, haven't heard that one before! Shame I can only give one upvote.
Man's a complete Muppet, but then he's a politician and (former) lawyer, neither of which inspires any confidence whatsoever.
Can't say I'm thrilled with the other team, either. Aren't they about due a leadership election - it's been weeks since the last one?
《"The nation with the best teeth"
Maybe at one point. Certainly not now..》
Many years ago I read the reason was the use of corn syrup as a sweetener instead of cane or beet sugar. The assertion was corn syrup (fructose+glucose) was a lot less likely than sucrose (cane sugar) to cause dental caries. Never bothered to discover the truth of this but interestingly corn syrup has also been blamed for the rise of obesity in the US. Both probably a load of codswallop.
Personally I blame the internet and "The Simpsons" (thanks Tracey Ullman)... for everything.
The WW2 GIs, apart from their main fault of being over here, did appear to have far better teeth than the Tommies or colonials.
On average, the US population have *worse* teeth than the UK. It's just that the rich have a fashion for cosmetic dentistry, and the rich and beautiful are the only ones they show on their media. The majority of the population cannot afford dentistry at all, and so have worse teeth than the average in the stereotypically-awful UK.
Though, with it now becoming impossible to find an NHS Dentist the UK is doing its best to join the US at the bottom of the pile.
"It seems like lead poisoning by projectile (of several calibres) is a big problem in 'Merica."
The wikipedia entry for Lead_Poisoning under symptoms pretty much describes the state of US society.
Loss of teeth doesn't appear to be a major sign of lead poisoning but is possibly due overconsumption of well earned knuckle sandwiches.
I'd maybe suggest that it's more to do with not having an aisle filled with guns, and an entire counter at the chemist handing out Opiates like Candy.
(Over 50,000 deaths caused by guns in the US in 2021 (majority Suicide) according to the CDC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081. And unfortunately, I can no longer find the Opiates Death article but it was a similar number of deaths. 100,000 people dying early, the vast majority not being already "old", drags down the average life expectancy in a very big way!).
Eh, I have a gun specifically so I can commit suicide, as any sort of assisted euthanasia is illegal here.
I am NOT going through Alzheimer's, nor am I subjecting my friends/family to it.
Edit: here's to hoping, though, that I never have to actually use it.
That's a strangely specific thing to be afraid of. I can only imagine you have family who have suffered through it, and fear hereditary effects.
But you should then probably be aware that Alzheimer's doesnt hit in a day. It's a pretty steady downward spiral, which takes a good year or two for you to actually notice and get perhaps an initial diagnosis. As such, you really dont have a good reason to own a gun right now. By all means, if you the worst happens and you get diagnosed with Alzheimer's and you still feel that way, then you can still buy a gun and make use of it. But there is really no reason to have a gun whilst your healthy. You're far more likely to have an accident with it and hurt yourselfv (or god forbid someone else) then to ever need to make use of it for Alzheimer's.
>But you should then probably be aware that Alzheimer's doesnt hit in a day. It's a pretty steady downward spiral,
That's why we don't have re-licensing requirements for old people driving.
You don't notice the steady decline, but one day you are driving your F150 the wrong way down the freeway and nature takes it's natural course.
> By all means, if you the worst happens and you get diagnosed with Alzheimer's and you still feel that way, then you can still buy a gun and make use of it. But there is really no reason to have a gun whilst your healthy.
I am thankfully not at the stage in my life where I need to consider such things. But in defense of the guy above you, if you wait until the last moment where it’s obvious you only want the gun for this purpose, it becomes far far more likely that someone will deny you that opportunity “for your own good”. Probably more reliable if you already have it squirreled away in a gun safe well in advance.
The lifestyle-induced diabetes and obesity epidemics are just getting under way. And, with the prospect of an effective diet pill, have just lost an incentive to change.
Gun deaths are unfortunate, but like RTAs (another astonishingly high number in the US in comparison with other OECD countries), they're fairly constant. And, if the majority are related to suicide, then removing the guns won't change that much. Gun deaths are a tragedy but I think that, at best, some kind of restriction on the kind of weapons available over the counter and possibly whom they're sold to, is the best you can hope for.
And, if the majority are related to suicide, then removing the guns won't change that much.
I'm not so sure that is true. Yes, some folks will always find a way to kill themselves. But a gun makes it very easy and very simple to end it all after a few drinks too many whereas in another home, without a gun, they would not have found the means to do so before they either passed out or sobered up.
Guns essentially remove the possibility of failing at suicide in a non-debilitating way. Some people who fail at their first suicide attempt try again and succeed, but many also get treatment and go on to full lives. A lot of people who are depressed also have suicidal ideation that they don't act on because they have no ready means of carrying it out, and the impulse passes.
Reminds me, albeit of a visit I made to friends in Olympia, WA. After the long transatlantic and transcontinental flights and two hour journey from the airport, I was offered coffee with a slightly self-deprecating remark: "we know American coffee isn't very good. But we do have the best creamers…" I simply didn't know what to say to that. Fortunately, out of the off came a guffaw from my friend.
I mean creamers? Have your coffee how you like it, but if you like it with milk or cream, have it with milk or cream, for a bit of luxury. Sugar if you must, and spices and spirits for special occasions. But then in the local supermarket I saw, if not quite an aisle, a bloody huge section of these "creamers", basically just more flavoured HFCS and fat products. Stuff that nobody has ever needed but, apparently something that America can no longer live without!
This study is all very well, but it is heavily focused on the developed nations. The US statistics suggest that this is not representative of humanity at large.
So here's the elephant in the room; what about indigenous populations of South America, India, China and Africa? These include the two largest nations on Earth, and - the elephant int he room whispers in my ear - might just alter the species statistics a tiny bit, no? And given that elephants themselves are notoriusly long-lived, I credit it with some experience of these things.
As nations develop, lifting the vast majority of their people out of poverty, you see the life expectancy grow massively. Up until you hit what was previously considered the plateau.
That's why the focus of this article would have been on the West. Western nations are pretty uniform on maximum life expectancy, and most of the rest of the world is slowly rising to match as their people rise to a "western" standard of living (i.e. access to accessible health care, sufficient nutrition, etc.). As such, if you're interested in what the maximum could be, then you explore those already at the maximum.
Oh and as for America, it's values are dropping primarily due to other factors - gun deaths, opiate abuse, unhealthy lifestyles, etc. So many people dying young, drags the average down...
>As nations develop, lifting the vast majority of their people out of poverty, you see the life expectancy grow massively. Up until you hit what was previously considered the plateau.
Fortunately now they will go past the plateau and hit the diet-and-exercise decline in less than a generation.
People whose parents grew up in famine will now die prematurely of western lifestyle diseases
You miss the point. This is about the plateau. The Buddhist nations have long had a higher plateau than the West, and I believe that also applies to Taoist monks and certain Hindu traditions.
Yes most folks die in poverty far below, but that is not what the plateau is about.
"Your life expectancy is ruled by your immune system, which starts failing at puberty!"
Apropos of nothing, from an evolutionary perspective, human lineages have been selected for (a) growing up enough to produce offspring and (b) living long enough that your offspring can fend for themselves and produce their own offspring. Seeing that historically, humans were having kids at a much younger age than is typical in the modern west, from an evolutionary POV, anything older than 35-40 is a bonus
People already know how to lead healthy lives which will maximise their potential lifespan, the focus should be on why some people choose not too.
I had two decades of the cycling to work / packed lunch routine (since made redundant by WFH) which left me in pretty good shape compared to my peers when I hit my fifties. Nothing esoteric, no deep thought or flashes of insight required. I was far from the only person doing this so why didn't my co-workers make the same choices?
Anon because at least one ex-colleague reads this site and I don't want this to be misunderstood as a personal criticism.
"focus should be on why some people choose not too"
Maybe focus first on why some people assume it's a choice, rather than a logistics problem or hidden disability etc.
You sound rather like the cycling loonies (and i write this as someone who used to cycle a LOT) who when faced with the reality of people needing cars in online forums, blame the person for not cycling, rather than looking to solve the actual issues.
@Moonhaus, I think that writing "choose not too" covers logistics and disabilities, both hidden and obvious.
For example, why would someone choose to work a significant distance (the logistical problem) from their home if they were required to attend that space on a regular basis?
Only once we have a greater understanding can we then take steps to ameliorate the problem.
> why would someone choose to work a significant distance (the logistical problem) from their home
Because moving each time you change job might be too expensive? Because your spouse works there, or your kids don't want to leave their friends and their school? Because you work in a place where living is not an option (downtown business center)? That's some of the reasons which come to mind, I'm sure I could find more.
"For example, why would someone choose to work a significant distance (the logistical problem) from their home if they were required to attend that space on a regular basis?"
Because they like their job and they like their home. Why would someone choose to abandon either one when they can commute in relative comfort instead of pedalling their arse off through heavy traffic and lousy weather?
I, too, used to cycle a lot, and I've recently bought a bike after 20+ years so I can do it for fun when I feel like it, but it won't be replacing my car
"People already know how to lead healthy lives which will maximise their potential lifespan, the focus should be on why some people choose not too."
Because people, even more than being addicted to cigarettes / beer / chips / fatty foods etc are first and foremost addicted to their own habits. "Knowing" something because your doctor tells you is very different from *knowing* something because you've experienced it
I would normally say it was the guy who said "I have a scoop for you. I stole his act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did."
but the closest quote I could find was "They proved that if you quit smoking, it will prolong your life. What they haven't proved is that a prolonged life is a good thing. I haven't seen the stats on that yet."
The "plateau" (area under the tail end of the bell-curve more accurately, it's not like we're programmed to self-destruct after X years) on lifespan won't be moving significantly until we fix a few very hard problems - brain degeneration (so dementia etc), cancer and heart/artery disease to name three. Risk of all of them go up with age.
Even then, 'healthspan' won't quite improve in the same way, as a 100 year old free of major disease is, well, still 100 years old and inevitably quite clapped out.
The real, root-cause fix will be to treat the *disease* known as 'aging'. So, looking at gene therapy. Research into super-centenarians has found some gene variants in common, and of course genes are also responsible for the extraordinary longevity/cancer resistance of some species e.g. Greenland shark, naked mole rat. We need to find the right genetic software to give all cells youthful vitality/immortality, but at the same time prevent uncontrolled division AKA cancer. Very difficult task, but no reason to believe impossible. Question is only will we be able to reach that point without destroying the planet in one form or other first? And if we make it that far, the ethical questions of who gets to have their firmware patched to human 2.0...
My (laughlably basic and incomplete) understanding was that we are kind of programmed to self destruct: the telomeres at the end of chromosomes will run out after X amount of cell divisions, and after that it's a free for all with our genes.
So yeah, probably genetic therapy will be the way to go.
> programmed to self destruct
Not really. We're just like cars (or household appliances): Some are more robust and well built, and can handle a higher mileage while others start falling apart quite fast.
(Yes, I know, this is highly discriminatory and politically incorrect and stuff, but the facts are there.)
If you are interesting in this story, regardless of your current age, then read Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, an excellent book by Daniel Lieberman that explains how we evolved and how we can improve our lives these days. It's very educational (Dan's a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University) and will tell you what has happened and what can happen in your future. I've read it and boosted my exercises, walking about 30 miles every week, and am happy, reading this book will help everyone.
Yes for "average" life-expectancy. What these studies are showing is that we are going from there being a handful of people who are newsworthy for reaching 100, to having to deal with 50% of the population living passed 100 - while at the same time having the number of young people declining
Well if that's the case we have plenty of people to choose from in the Senate who are older than other Trump or Biden! Unfortunately no one as old as Strom Thurmond was, who was in office until he was a few months shy of his 100th birthday IIRC.
No one is excited about giving Biden another term, but if it is between him and Trump I expect him to win in a landslide. The republican party is screwed because a majority but not a strong majority of its voters would vote for Trump in the primaries again. Hardly any independents (by independents I mean that 10% of the population who are truly independent, not people who are registered independent because they like they think they are but vote for one party almost all the time) would vote for him in the general election this time around, so if they nominate him they are cutting their own throats.
Only people who get all their news from Fox or worse and believe Jan. 6th was a peaceful demonstration by patriots protesting a stolen election want to see the orange snowflake back in office.
A major flaw that things that have been developing since the industrial revolution is, that it doesn't really take into consideration many of the consequences of the developments that have led to this progress: a growing population needed to be fed led to overfishing and overuse of land. We continue to displace and destroy ecosytems to feed ourselves. Energy from fossil fuel: Northern latitudes simply couldn't support our population density in winter without the energy provided by fossil fuels. Summer provides its own problems, but doesn't need quite as much energy. We're starting to get a feel for the consequences of burning all those dinosaurs and trees… But even healthcare, beyond improvements in hygiene, is starting to run into limits as resistant bacteria develop. Whether it's resistant TB or MRSA, if we don't find a solution soon, we can expect pandemics to bring that plateau down.
Retardistani life expectancy is plummeting like a depressed 737 Max. There's school shootings every second hour, then there's the Sith spawn antivaxxers including a notable family I saw "6 out of 9 of us have died from cv19 but we're not having the vaccine, we don't need it..."
What the sister shaggers are eating is entirely irrelevant. They're happy that the leading cause of pediatric death is school shootings. It's fine and dandy that their kids end up as kiddie-pizza™. They refuse to vaccinate against anything, they blame vaccines designed to STOP cv19 and its various cardiac effects for the cardiac effects of cv19, while running a bloody MARATHON with covid and wondering why idiot boy dies of a heart attack...
Im sorry but they're doing it to themselves.
And people like them are putting my life at risk. I'm fighting breast cancer & (the next) red devil chemo mashes your immune system... But hey, let's not get immunised, let's go out with active cv19 infection. I can tell you Fibromyalgia, Carboplatin/Nab-Paclitaxel chemo, breast cancer and cv19 is *not* an enjoyable experience.
The sooner their civil war starts and they nuke everything between Mexica and Canada to glass, the happier I'll be.
#Retardistan #Inbredistan #Failedstate
As for being able to live for 140 years - if you're like my gran, who was running round like a lemming for 93 years and healthy bar arthritis I've no problems with the idea.. But I'm not like that. I've had cancer for 13 years straight, Fibromyalgia for longer. Life isn't so much fun.. Another 90 odd years of hospitals and chronic pain, thanks but no.
So there are a bunch of states busily producing an abundance of low-skilled, un-educated people with low life-expectancy, just as we are going to need more low-skilled care workers for the ageing elite?
We've created morlochs but persuaded them to eat McDonald's instead - sounds like a brilliant plan
"And people like them are putting my life at risk. I'm fighting breast cancer & (the next) red devil chemo mashes your immune system... But hey, let's not get immunised, let's go out with active cv19 infection. I can tell you Fibromyalgia, Carboplatin/Nab-Paclitaxel chemo, breast cancer and cv19 is *not* an enjoyable experience."
So, what you're saying is, they should be forced into medical treatment as a convenience to you.
Got it, you're as selfish as them. All you had to do was say that.
I don't expect Canadian lifespans to be all that much better, given that we end up inhaling a lot of the factory "food" that the Americans produce here in Canada. If we've a longer lifespan, it is because we don't have artificial limits on healthcare imposed by greedy insurance companies who buy off the government to keep the cash flowing...
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