A study published in Nature sets the absolute limit on human life at 150 years. Beyond that, the human body would completely lose its ability to recover from stresses such as illness and injury, inevitably leading to death.
Human lifespan under the microscope
Scientific progress continually pushes back the inevitable deadline of death, but there would be an insurmountable limit: 150 ansaccording to a study published on May 25, 2022 in the journal Nature Communications. This concludes that from a certain age range, the human body is in fact no longer able to recover from the tests to which it is subjected.
This study is not the first to rely on modeling to examine human lifespan. Jan Vijg, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, estimated in 2016 that it would be unlikely that humans will live past 125 years old. Some, in 2018, have even argued that there is no ultimate limit to human lifespan.
A limit to resilience
As part of this work, researchers from Singapore-based biotechnology company Gero, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, and the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow analyzed large sets of anonymized medical data collected from 500,000 people in the United States, United Kingdom and Russia, each of which has offered several blood tests.
The researchers focused on two biomarkers of aging, namely a ratio between two different types of white blood cells and a measure of variability in red blood cell size. From these tests, the researchers then used a computer model to determine what they called a “ dynamic state indicator of the organism“, or DOSI, for each person. They used this measurement to determine the “recovery time” of each individual subjected to life stresses (illnesses, injuries, etc.).
Ultimately, the researchers used this mathematical modeling to predict thatafter 120 to 150 yearsresilience, that is to say a person’s ability to recover from a health problem, decreases considerably. Humans would then gradually become incapable of fully recovering from health problems, to the point of inexorably weakening until death. According to these data, it would therefore be illusory to hope to exceed 150 years.
The researchers also point out that at this point, the only way to increase resilience in older people to increase their lifespan would be to create mechanical organs or find ways to reprogram aging cells. However, for the moment, we are not there yet.
The implications of this limit are numerous, not only for biomedical research but also for public policies and health systems. As human life expectancy increases, the challenges associated with population aging and degenerative diseases also increase. Knowledge of a theoretical limit could direct scientific efforts towards approaches not only focused on longevity but also on quality of life, by integrating more adapted care and technological advances to maintain functional autonomy in the last years of life. .
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