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Change Your Life! |
Maximum age at death trending higher and higher, study shows |
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September 30, 2000
WASHINGTON, SEPT 29 (AP) - In the 1860s, the oldest person to die each year in Sweden was about 100. Last year, that age had risen to 108. Researchers are finding this trend in all industrialized countries and say the very old may get even older. Plotting the increasing maximum age of death among the Swedes, says researcher John R. Wilmoth, suggests the life span of humans is expanding and that there is no clear upper limit. "I don't expect modern medical breakthroughs that will allow people to live to 200 or something," said Wilmoth, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. "But there is no evidence that we are bumping up against some absolute limit yet." Wilmoth is first author of a study appearing Friday in the journal Science. He said the research shows a clear trend that the oldest at death will die at a later and later age. It also supports other studies that show more and more people are living to extreme ages. "This means the 10 percent of the kids born today who live to be the oldest will die at an older age than do the 10 percent that was born 20 years ago," he said. Wilmoth said his study was the first to show that the maximum age at death was being pushed back and that there is a clear lengthening of the human life span. Bruce A. Carnes, a researcher at the Center on Aging in the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, said Wilmoth's finding of a trend in the maximum age of death is not surprising. "We are getting unprecedented numbers of people surviving into extreme ages," said Carnes. "We have more people living beyond 60 and 70 than ever before." But Carnes said that measuring the maximum age at death of a population has little to do with the life expectancy of most people. "These are exceptional people," said Carnes. "These are achievements in extreme longevity that really isn't anything that the rest of us will reach." Nonetheless, Carnes said he expects eventually the longevity record will be broken. A Frenchwoman, Jeanne Calment, died in 1997 at the oldest documented age of 122.45 years. In his research, Wilmoth and his colleagues used the Swedish population records because they are known to be the most nearly accurate in the world extending across so many years. Sweden began a systematic recording of births and deaths in 1749. "Sweden is a unique population laboratory," said Wilmoth. "There is no other country in the world that has records of births and deaths over that long a period of time." He said the population trends recorded in Sweden generally apply to countries in Western Europe and North America. Starting in the population records of 1861, Wilmoth and his team plotted the age of the oldest person to die in Sweden that year and in every year up through 1999. At first, the maximum age of death was about 100. That rose at the rate of .44 years per decade until 1969, when suddenly the trend spurted upward. From 1970 to 1999, said Wilmoth, the maximum age of death advanced by 1.11 years per decade. The oldest person to die in 1999 was 108. An analysis of that rapid rise in the trend, he said, shows it was caused by an improvement in the survival of the old - people in their 70s and beyond. "We now have a large number of centenarians and people who live to extreme old age," he said. One reason is that medicine in recent years has substantially improved the treatment of diseases of aging, said Wilmoth. But he said the elderly alive today also are benefiting from the public health improvements started 80 to 100 years ago. These included such things as rat control, good food supply, clean water and inoculations against disease. "The elderly today were not as sick as children as those in past generations," he said. "Because they were not exposed to disease when they were younger, they developed stronger bodies and start the aging process at a higher base line." --- On the Net: Science magazine: http://www.eurekalert.org
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