Human lifespan has decreased. Here’s what you can do for a long life.

• There are many things a healthy lifestyle can do for your longevity.
• But in old age, a large part of the equation comes down to genetics.
• A new study suggests that only a small percentage of adults will live to be 100, barring a major breakthrough.

Collectively speaking, we are living longer than ever before.

Life expectancy in the US has increased at a rate of about three years per decade over the past century: from about 47 years in 1900 to 77 years in 2000. This was largely due to major medical advances and public health movements that increased longevity, including hand washing, proper sanitation, diet and exercise.

A review published Monday in Nature Aging suggests that our longevity-enhancing heyday is coming to an end.

As more people in rich countries reach old age, the increase in people’s life expectancy is approaching a plateau. There is no demographic evidence to suggest that most of us alive will make it into triple digits, no matter how hard we try, how rich we might become, or what any biological age test might tell us. It seems that there are some hard limits to what medicine and biology can do for human life span, at least now.

“If someone tells you they know how to get you to 100, don’t listen to them because they don’t know what they’re talking about,” study lead author S. Jay Olshansky, a biostatistician who studies upper limits. of human longevity at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told Business Insider.

His claim is that, barring great advances, only 15% of women and 5% of men may live to be 100 this century. This best-case estimate is backed by 30 years of demographic study of some of the world’s longest-lived and wealthiest countries from 1990 to 2019.

But, he says, this is no cause for despair. It’s a reality check.

“We have a lot of people who get to 85 or 90,” he said, but “100 is not going to happen for most people.”

The study also has ramifications for the science of aging, as stagnant life expectancy curves mean that longevity scientists will need to develop creative new tactics to provide humanity with major gains in life expectancy in the coming decades.

There is still much we can do to live a long life

Olshansky’s new study includes data from the US, plus eight of the world’s longest-living countries (Australia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland) and the only place that, until recently, boasted the consistently the longest life expectancy on Earth (Hong Kong). The study tracks trends in death rates and life expectancy from 1990 to 2019, before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He says his projection doesn’t mean that personal health choices are unimportant.

“The first take-home message is: Avoid things that shorten life,” he said. “One of the reasons people often don’t live as long as they can is because they adopt unhealthy lifestyles.”

Some of the best anti-aging interventions we have today include healthy, plant-based, whole-grain diets combined with ample exercise.

There is some serious science to suggest that lifting weights can helps you maintain your mobilitystimulate bone health and reduce pain. Cardio like running, walking, swimming and cycling has benefits beyond just keeping your heart healthy or lowering your blood pressure. It can help protect the brain from cognitive decline and reduce the risk of premature death. Scientists often say that exercise is the best anti-aging medicine we’ve ever found.

Much of what determines who makes it past the century mark comes down to genetic luck.

“When someone says, ‘What’s the best advice you can give someone about living to be a hundred?’ My answer is: choose long-lived parents,” Olskansky said. “There is a strong genetic component to how long we can live, and we can’t really control that. So control what you can control.”

New ways to slow down aging

Aging researchers generally agree that new tactics beyond traditional drugs, vaccines, and supplements will be needed to improve human health and longevity at very old ages.

“We’ve created a toolbox in medicine to track one disease at a time,” Olshansky said. To move forward, the science of aging “must go after the aging process itself,” he said.

Future advances could come from innovations in genetics, cellular reprogramming, and other areas of biology.

“Big breakthroughs in a technology only happen as a result of a lot of previous work that doesn’t have real dramatic consequences until it happens,” senior researcher Aubrey de Gray told Business Insider. De Gray says he is focusing on “damage repair” interventions against aging and is studying regenerative medicine in mice, which could lead to breakthroughs for extending human lifespans. He is currently testing various combinations of stem cell treatments, drugs (including one that is a potential “zombie cell” killer) and gene therapy.

“The goal is to gather enough of these to be able to essentially cover all the bases,” he said.

Physicist and aging researcher Peter Fedichev is another aging scientist considering paradigm shifts that could help slow the aging process itself. His AI-based drug company, Gero, has yet to develop any human-tested treatments, but is collaborating with pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, on research to develop new targets for fibrotic disease.

“If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, the solution doesn’t seem to be there,” Fedichev told BI. “We need to decouple aging and disease in our minds, and we should put effort into designing anti-aging interventions to prevent this decline.”