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

Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

"These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress ..."

Perhaps not as much progress has been made as our scientists say then?

Re: Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

[Jzanu]

You idiots trot out that trite phrase as soon as research is mentioned because you donâ(TM)t understand it. Stop trying to âoelookâ smart and go study more. Try reading more than a Wikipedia page about research methods, because there are very rigorous ways to determine causality that require a bit more background to understand. Try SEM, and see how much you understand.

Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

[quantaman]

"These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress ..."

Perhaps not as much progress has been made as our scientists say then?

It's more a claim that human health has an asymptotic limit that we're approaching.

When it comes to athletics there's basically three ways to beat records, improve the talent pool (more healthy people), improve the training, improve the equipment, and doping.

If Daniel Epstein is to be believed Usain Bolt was only slightly faster than Jesse Owens, which suggests it's almost all equipment and the talent pool, training, and even doping don't make much of a difference for male sprinters.

For any sport there's an optimal physique, and outside of fundamentally changing human biology you can't really do much better.

For longevity most of our improvements have come from nutrition and fixing things that go wrong. But at a certain age we exceed the design specs and a ton of really important things start going wrong at the same time. To really start changing things we'll need to figure out how to replace whole systems, how to replace worn out parts of brains.

Now, I think the study is missing one big thing on the longevity side, obesity. I suspect it's cancelled out a ton of the medical advancements of the past few decades. At some point we're going to solve obesity and at that point we're going to see a big jump in longevity.

Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

[Megane]

At some point we're going to solve obesity and at that point we're going to see a big jump in longevity.

Maybe in average lifespan, but age 114 seems to be a point after which the human body really starts to fail. And this is apparently related to the balance between the body being able to heal itself vs cells going cancerous.

Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

[quantaman]

First of all, I don't believe that we have "design specs" when it comes to longevity, or any other characteristic. Indeed, the fact that "a ton of really important things start going wrong at the same time," is evidence of either a lack of design or poor design IMO.

To my understanding, there are essentially three major problems, which may be interrelated to various degrees.

1) DNA degradation over time
2) Insufficient repair and regrowth of damaged tissue
3) Inadequate waste removal, including cholesterol and heavy metals.

If we find a treatment for the first, we will likely solve the second.

There has been no evolutionary pressure to solve any of these things. In fact, we could just as easily call reproduction the solution to these problems, since it avoids all of them while maintaining the survival of the species. It does little for the survival of individuals, however, and may even hasten the aging process. ;)

Have you ever added a major new feature to an application? You'd think you just write the new feature and you're done, but that's only part of it, because that new feature is going to do things to your application that it wasn't built for, and when that happens you're going to find your application has way more bugs than you realized.

That's basically the case with aging, except its worse because our DNA wasn't written by someone saying "break up the grow_organ function so we can reuse it if we ever implement the regenerate heart feature". It's literally a collection of random hacks to fix fatal bugs, and that's not the recipe for a robust code base.

We do not work well when you expose us to scenarios not covered by evolution. Just look how bad we are metabolically with modern food and lifestyles. And don't even try exposing someone to a vacuum for a minute.

In extreme old age nothing works in the conditions it expects so every system goes haywire, we basically become walking instances of Windows ME.

Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

[crunchygranola]

It's not that cells run out of steam ~114, it's that nothing is designed to last that long. So once you're past 110 it doesn't matter if you fix 5 potentially fatal things because 10 others are about to break.

Does anyone here know the poem "The Deacon’s Masterpiece or, the Wonderful "One-hoss Shay": A Logical Story" by Oliver Weldell Holmes? It recounts the story of a superbly constructed One-Horse Shay, that is built so as to have no weak spot and begins:

Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay,
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it — ah, but stay,
I’ll tell you what happened without delay,
...

Continuing:

Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,
Deacon and deaconess dropped away,
Children and grandchildren — where were they?
But there stood the stout old one-hoss shay
As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day!

And concluding:

Close by the meet’n’-house on the hill.
First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill, —
And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half past nine by the meet’n-house clock, —
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!
What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you’re not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once, —
All at once, and nothing first, —
Just as bubbles do when they burst.

Well, sort of.

[jerry33]

"Human Lifespans Have Already Hit Their Peak Based on Current Methodologies and Technology" should be the title. My thought is that new methodologies and technologies, such as being able to keep cellular information from deteriorating as people age due to replication degradation, should increase lifespan. My understanding is that almost all body cells are replaced every seven years, but each total replacement is less accurate than the previous one. After a few replication cycles, information deteriorates, similar to a photocopy of a photocopy.

Medicine needs to change focus

[Kjella]

We've gotten *very* good at dealing with sick people. But we haven't really made any big progress on making healthy people healthier by slowing the effect of aging. Being in "good health" means entirely different things for a 20yo and an 80yo. I think it's because it's very ethically challenging to experiment on healthy people, like if you got cancer obviously we'll treat that. But if you're "only" getting older, do we really dare mess that up? I'd say the answer is overwhelmingly no, unless there's nothing wrong with you we'll do nothing. Okay eat healthy, exercise but nothing to truly stall the decline.

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.

Re:Medicine needs to change focus

[thomst]

Kjella opined:

We've gotten *very* good at dealing with sick people. But we haven't really made any big progress on making healthy people healthier by slowing the effect of aging. Being in "good health" means entirely different things for a 20yo and an 80yo. I think it's because it's very ethically challenging to experiment on healthy people, like if you got cancer obviously we'll treat that. But if you're "only" getting older, do we really dare mess that up? I'd say the answer is overwhelmingly no, unless there's nothing wrong with you we'll do nothing. Okay eat healthy, exercise but nothing to truly stall the decline.

Actually, almost all of the gains in average human lifespan in the 20th century are directly attributable to antibiotics and widespread vaccination against (mostly) childhood diseases.

Maximum human lifespan has changed little, if at all, since the dawn of recorded history. What changed dramatically in the prior century was average lifespan, which is a very different thing. Prior to the wide availability of penicillin in the mid-1940's, a staggering number of humans died from infections that became easily treatable afterward. As more antibiotics - and especially antibiotics that were effective against infections for which penicillin was useless - were introduced, mortality from infection essentially came to a halt in the developed world.

The advent of immunizations for diseases other than smallpox likewise had an enormous impact on morbidity rates from endemic and epidemic diseases that had theretofore taken a staggering toll among infants and children, such as polio, whooping cough, measles, rubella, and mumps. One of the principal reasons families in the pre-immunization era tended to be large was that approximately 50% of children died before they reached adulthood, and the death of a young child was a commonplace tragedy that most families experienced at least once.

Largely halting those deaths - and the equally common deaths of women from "puerperal fever" as a result of infections acquired during childbirth - accounts for virtually all of the apparent increase in human lifespan in the past century or so. As the number of women who survived childbirth, and their children who survived childhood diseases that were ubiquitous prior to widespread, mandatory immunization as a public health measure rose almost logarythmically, the average age of death also increased, as a direct result of their survival.

The truly frightening thing to me is the prospect that the antibiotics upon which so much of this apparent increase in human lifespan depends are rapidly losing their effectiveness due to overuse. (And, while general practictioners who allow their patients to browbeat them into prescribing antibiotics for viral infections such as colds and flus - against which they are completely ineffective - are major contributors to the trend, the most responsible culprits are livestock growers who use them in incredible quantities, not to treat diseases in their food animals, but as preventatives, which they add to their fodder every freakin' day.) Combine that with the profoundly anti-scientific "anti-vax" movement among parents in the USA, and you have a prescription for a planet-wide return to the same death rates that were the rule for all human populations prior to the 20th century.

If you doubt that; if you consider the threat ludicrously overstated, consider this: penicillin - the miracle drug that began the antibiotic revolution - is no longer prescribed by doctors. That's not because there are "newer and better options available." It's because it no longer works. So many bacteria have evolved strong resistance to penicillin that it has become almost entirely ineffective. And it's not the only one that has lost its power.

It's just the first one ...

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:My dad died this year

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

The fundies object to embryonic research. Kidneys and other organs are grown from somatic cells, ideally taken from the recipient.

A more immediate solution would be a free market in organs, which would increase the donor pool. Ignorant people object, by claiming that selling organs would lead to abuses, without realizing that the hospitals already buy and sell organs. It is only illegal for the donor to receive a portion of the money. So the money incentivizes everyone but the person capable of increasing the supply.

Fucking hypocrites.

You may disagree with them (as do I), but what about their behavior is hypocritical?

Re:My dad died this year

[Virtual_Raider]

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.

My condolences, annon. Regarding organ growth I was thinking something similar. At the turn of the XX Century people thought more or less the same, they believed that humans could never travel at higher than 20Km/hr, or couldn't run faster than some record of the time. Then tech changed and we did. Once they figure out the kinks of individual organ cloning without having to grow a whole being (and hopefully, without having to grow them inside an existing being, such as a pig) then well be in another era of pushing back those limits.

Is the plateau due to crummy diet advice?

[swb]

I wonder how the misguided diet advice of low fat/low dietary cholesterol/high carbs in the late 1960s onward is reflected in this study.

I would guess that the general improvement of human metrics extended slightly past the dawn of that dietary advice (ie, the 1990s) and the drop in statistically broad improvement may not be a hard limit but a byproduct of bad nutrition advice which has turned into the obesity epidemic.

I'm also not sure that growing any taller is really of that much utility, either. It may be in a world defined physical combat, but its general utility is kind of limited because it implies greater nutritional demand. Maybe some distant future interstellar anthropologists will say something like:

"It's apparent from their overly large skeletons that these were a people who would not have been capable of organized long distance space flight. Their nutritional demands and excess mass would have consumed too much energy and literally crushed them to death when accelerating to hyperspace. We now understand that only species whose height doesn't exceed 12 Nzsrs and mass doesn't exceed 35 Pmbrs will ever become interstellar."

I'm just surprised we're not going backwards

[JustNiz]

...since natural selection is actually the mechanism for evolution, yet society has totally undermined it with its ongoing mission to remove even the slightest possible risk to humans. It also mandates that even the most unsuitable people banging out kids as fast as they can is supposed to be celebrated by all.

Re:I'm just surprised we're not going backwards

[blindseer]

But from an objective standpoint an increase in penis size and decrease in intelligence in humans cannot be argued to represent an evolutionary advancement.

Objectively speaking there is no such thing as "evolutionary advancement" since advancement implies some form of goal that evolution is leading towards, and that we know what that goal is.

Study fails to understand what happened.

[gurps_npc]

1) It is not true that human life spans, height, and athleticism naturally improve. They assumed this by looking at an unusual period of time, the last century. There was NO natural, gradual improvement.

2) What is true is that in the past hundred years we made three different discoveries, each of which INSTANTLY raised lie expectancy, height, and athleticism to their current values. But it took a long time for that knowledge to spread. There are still people out there smoking cigarettes, drinking to excess, etc. Those three issues were healthy lifestyles (life span), nutrition (height), exercise (athleticism).

3) There are several discoveries that are not advances in healthy lifestyle, nutrition, or exercise that are very promising new ways to improve all three of those statistics. Genetic engineering and cyber-replacements could each individually increase any or all of those three things.

Technically, we can already increase anyone's height that has lost both legs. (https://www.quora.com/When-someone-is-getting-two-artificial-legs-can-they-pick-their-new-height)

The basic question they asked shows their assumptions are silly.

Doesn't this come out every few decades?

[mveloso]

Doesn't this story come out every 15-20 years or so?

It basically says the same thing, that humans will never get better/taller/faster/more attractive than today. Then they say the same thing in 15-20 years, except that everything got better/faster/taller/more attractive during that time.

They've grabbed all the low-hanging fruit

[hyades1]

Training and equipment allowed significant performance improvements in a relatively short period of time. How high could one of today's pole vaulters reach using a pole from the 1950's? Or put one of today's cyclists on a bike from that era and see whether they break any Tour de France records. Technique and nutrition have also been refined to the point where there will probably be very few more major improvements.

These factors allowed elite athletes (now sorted into various sports by body type) to improve their performance very significantly without changing the basic human body all that much. The next step, though...actually modifying an individual's genetic structure...may produce some pretty spectacular results.

They forgot the third dimension!

[Picodon]

We have stopped (...) growing taller...

I fear that we haven’t stopped growing wider, though.

Research into Human Performance Enhancement

[Bruce Perens]

There are unexplored paths, such as research into human performance enhancement. These are blocked by the anti-doping organizations that plague athletic organizations. Some competitions should be open to deliberate enhancement.

Re:Research into Human Performance Enhancement

[slshdtisctrldbysjws]

Yeah, but what the hell is the point of that?
The purpose behind athletics is already destroyed; our athletic role models live for nothing but the game. That's not healthy. They contribute absolutely nothing to society in 99.9999% of cases. They just play games.

Athleticism is supposed to make you a well-rounded individual.

Re:Hitler was right!

[Immerman]

Did you intend to imply that eugenics is inherently fascist? Seems like a rather extreme claim. Certainly a fascist regime would have a relatively easy time implementing such a thing, but that can be said for a great many social policies.

Eugenics could be implemented in a great many ways, as easily with the carrot as the stick.

Re: My dad died this year

[uncqual]

Damn, now I wonder which one of the of the cute red head twins in my high school class decades ago was "truly" a "living being" and which one was something else. Although, I'm not sure I would have cared if both of them were interested in doing more detailed research on that question with me as the lead investigator. I'm sure my research completion deadlines would have continuously been moved out as I learned more though. So many tests, so little time...

Re:Find a cure...for Greed.

[DNS-and-BIND]

I'm just curious because you sound really bitter. Where is this human society that is like what you want? When has it ever existed in history? I'm just curious. It seems a lot to me like you want a totally unworkable Utopia and your idealism has disillusioned you. It's just that this greed is the force that has maxed out our lives and given us better food than anywhere on the planet, alcohol and tobacco are heavily taxed and provide tons of revenue. In fact, those are "sin taxes" that are a result of Christianity. It just seems nothing is good enough for you, where does this society you desire exist?