A recent study published in Nature sets the absolute limit on human life at 150 years. Beyond that, the human body would totally lose its ability to recover from stresses like illness and injury, inevitably leading to death.
Scientific progress is continually pushing back the inevitable timeline for death, but there is an insurmountable limit:150 years, according to a study published on May 25 in the journal Nature Communications . This concludes that from a certain age group, the human body is no longer able to recover from the ordeals 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 humans would be unlikely to live past 125. Some in 2018 even argued that there is no ultimate limit to human lifespan.
As part of this work, researchers from the Singapore-based biotechnology company Gero, the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, and the Institute Kurchatov of Moscow, analyzed large sets of anonymized medical data collected from 500,000 people in the United States, United Kingdom and Russia, each of whom offered several blood tests.
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. Roughly, they used this measurement to determine the "recovery time" of each individual subjected to the stresses of life (diseases, injuries, etc.).
Finally, the researchers used mathematical modeling to predict that after 120 to 150 years, resilience, that is, a person's ability to recovering from a health problem, decreases considerably. Humans would then gradually become unable to fully recover from health problems, to the point of inexorably weakening towards 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. But for now, we are not there yet.
