How old can a human live to be — and for how long can they be expected to live in good health? Average lifespans have increased over the past century thanks to improved nutrition and advances in medical science. As a result, these questions have increasingly exercised demographers and researchers studying ageing. The answers matter: not just to individuals, but to societies seeking to build sustainable social systems around ageing populations.
Yet there is little agreement about what the available data show. Some researchers say that gains in overall life expectancy are mostly or entirely due to reductions in mortality earlier in life, rather than more people living to grand old ages, and that there could be a limit to longevity hard-wired into human genetics. Others see exactly the opposite pattern in the data. Meanwhile, claims about the prevalence of ‘supercentenarians’ — people living to an age of 110 or more — have come under the spotlight, with many cases of extremely long-lived individuals being questioned or debunked.
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