Can we really live to be 100 years old, and be in good health? Is 100 realistically the new 30? Our life expectancy is about twice that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors but has remained relatively flat since 2014 despite an accelerating rate of medical advancements. Â This raises the question then about how just important are medical advancements.
What Really Contributes to Increases in Lifespan?
Do medical advancements contribute to increases in lifespan?
If our hunter gatherer ancestors got past childhood, they lived to be 68 to 78 not unlike we do today. The biggest contributor to life expectancy has not been medical advancements as much as a reduction in childhood mortality. It has also been shown and as we discussed in Does Medicine Matter? that absence of healthcare only contributes 10% to premature deaths with an unhealthy lifestyle contributing anywhere from 45% to 60% depending on the study.
A study headed by S. Jay Oshansky published in October 2024 suggests that survival to age 100 years is unlikely to exceed 15% for females and 5% for males, altogether suggesting that, unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century. The study found since 1990, improvements overall in life expectancy have decelerated.
According to Dr. Oshansky, “Most people alive today at older ages are living on time that was manufactured by medicine….But these medical Band-Aids are producing fewer years of life even though they’re occurring at an accelerated pace, implying that the period of rapid increases in life expectancy is now documented to be over.”
He goes on further to say, “Our result overturns the conventional wisdom that the natural longevity endowment for our species is somewhere on the horizon ahead of us – a life expectancy beyond where we are today. Instead it’s behind us – somewhere in the 30- to 60-year range. We’ve now proven that modern medicine is yielding incrementally smaller improvements in longevity even though medical advances are occurring at breakneck speed.”
Quality Versus Quantity of Lifespan
Though they may not lead to increases in lifespan, many medical advancements have improved quality of life and perhaps that is what we should direct our focus – improving the quality of life rather than extending lifespan. Our current lifespan is about 77-78 with 68 of those years fully functional. Those years we live when we are fully functional is know as our health span. Thus, we live 10 years with quality of life many of us would find not desirable.
Increases in lifespan have been primarily the result of water purification, sanitation, antibiotics, and possibly some contribution from vaccines. Where modern medicine has made a difference has been more in the quality of life, not in the quantity of life. Quality of life is driven more by lifestyle and genetics.
References:
- Schroeder, MD, Steven A. We Can Do Better- Improving the Health of the American People. The New England Journal of Medicine, September 20, 2007;357:1221-1228
- Mokdad, AH, Marks, JS, Strop, DF, et al. Actual Causes of Death in the United States, 2000. JAMA. January 19, 2005; 293(3):298.
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-024-00702-3
