X-Message-Number: 15694 From: Subject: We won't all be centenarians - yet Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 09:42:02 +1100 We won't all be centenarians - yet By David Derbyshire in San Francisco People are unlikely to live routinely beyond their 100th birthday until at least the next century, a study says. Despite some predictions that life expectancy will rise dramatically with improved diet and health care, research suggests that increases will be on the scale of weeks and months rather than years for the foreseeable future. The report is by a team led by Dr Jay Olshanksy, of the University of Chicago's School of Public Health. In a paper to be published in the journal Science this week, he examined trends in death rates between 1985 and 1995. His conclusion was that life expectancy at birth would not reach 100 until the next century in Europe and Japan and the 26th century in the United States. Although people are living longer, the rise in life expectancy appears to be slowing. Dr Olshanksy said: "This is not surprising, because life expectancy is very difficult to increase once it approaches 80 years. "Adding decades to the lives of people who have lived for 70 years or more is far more difficult than adding decades to the lives of children who are dying of infectious diseases." Dr Olshanksy said that people would continue to live longer and that most Western societies could expect to see an explosion in the aging population over the next couple of decades. But the next major leap in life expectancy would occur only if biologists could learn how to modify the aging process. Without that discovery, changes in people's ways of life and diet would add only a couple of extra years to the average life. The other authors are Bruce Carnes, of the University of Chicago, and Aline Desesquelles at the Institut National d' tudes Demographiques in Paris. Dr Carnes said that their approach took into account biological as well as statistical factors. "The purely mathematical approach which was often used to make such forecasts may not violate any mathematical rules. But when used to forecast life expectancy over a long period, this approach ignores the biological forces and constraints that influence how long people are capable of living." The authors estimated that life expectancy at birth for males and females combined would reach 85 years in 2033 in France, 2035 in Japan and 2182 in the US. Recent evidence suggested that death rates for people age 80 and older were improving much more slowly in the US than in Japan and France, for example. The Daily Telegraph, London I don't follow this belief because it does not take into account major breakthroughs of which there were none of any major signifcance between 1985 and 1995. We had breakthroughs with the discovery of Penicillin and with vaccines. The next breakthroughs could be with gene therapy, non invasive surgery, robotic surgery, designed drugs and many other candidates. There is never any guarantees but to use trends between 1985 and 1985 seems poor judgement to me and the unspecified "biological forces" seem highly contentious. Why the US is going to be so far behind is also something of a mystery to me. Chris Benatar Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15694