Researchers Say Human Lifespans Have Already Hit Their Peak (newsweek.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Newsweek: We have reached our peak in terms of lifespan, athletic performance and height, according to a new survey of research and historical records... "These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress," said Jean-FranÃois Toussaint, a physiologist at Paris Descartes University, France, in a press release... For the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, a team of French scientists, including Toussaint, from a range of fields analyzed 120 years' worth of historical records and previous research to gauge the varying pace of changes seen in human athletic performance, human lifespan and human height. While, as they observe, the 20th century saw a surge in improvements in all three areas that mirrored industrial, medical and scientific advances, the pace of those advances has slowed significantly in recent years.

The team looked at world records in a variety of sports, including running, swimming, skating, cycling and weight-lifting. Olympic athletes in those sports continually toppled records by impressive margins from the early 1900s to the end of the 20th century, according the study. But since then, Olympic records have shown just incremental improvements. We have stopped not only getting faster and stronger, according to the study, but also growing taller... [D]ata from the last three decades suggest that heights have plateaued among high-income countries in North America and Europe... As for our human lifespan, life expectancy in high-income countries rose by about 30 years from 1900 to 2000, according to a National Institutes of Health study cited by the authors, thanks to better nutrition, hygiene, vaccines and other medical improvements. But we may have maxed out our biological limit for longevity. The researchers found that in many human populations, says Toussaint, "it's more and more difficult to show progress in lifespan despite the advances of science."

Comments

My dad died this year

[Anonymous Coward]

A new kidney would have saved him. We need a plan to grow new organs, even if it's in pigs or in brainless human bodies. Of course the Christian fundamentalists will never let this happen. Fucking hypocrites.

Charts

[phantomfive]

Here is the chart of peak athletic performance. I didn't realize it had plateaued so much since 1980.
Chart of oldest person, compared with oldest living olympian since olympians tend to live longer.

The paper is basically an argument against Aubrey de Grey, who claims that in the near future, we will figure out specific technologies (and de Grey lists them) that will allow us to live 200 or even 500 years. Unfortunately the argument is weak (as I understand it), because it relies on analysis of aggregate technology improvements (technologies including things like washing hands and antibiotics).

The obvious counter-argument would be, "Of course, sometimes progress goes fast, sometimes slow; sometimes in spurts, sometimes it stalls. Regardless of whether it comes fast or slow, when we figure out the solutions to these problems, we will live a really long time." In that sense, the paper knocks down something of a strawman (by not addressing their opponent's strongest argument).

Re:Medicine needs to change focus

[Kjella]

I think a lot of stagnation in human lifespan is due to our extremely sloppy diets and an overabundance of food.

The statistics don't really support that. There's quite a few people living very healthy and their lifespan is obviously longer, but not extremely so. Once you're quite old death seems more and more random with less and less connection to how you lived years ago. Like if you're 90 years old then how you lived the first 80 years of your life isn't much worth in predicting who'll become 100. There's just too many things people in their 90s die from where it doesn't matter. Anecdotally, when they interview the record holders and such they're often not the stellar example of healthy living you might think. Granted, good health will help you avoid a "premature" death. But that last bit from quite old to really old seems to be mostly luck.