How old can a human being live?

A team of researchers from Singapore believes they have succeeded in determining the maximum age that can be reached by the human species.

How much time do we still have ahead of us? No one knows, but what is the maximum life expectancy?

What is the maximum life expectancy?

It continues to rise every year, and this in itself is good news and a sign of good health for societies: average life expectancy continues to increase. If centenarians were once rare, improvements in our living conditions and advances in medicine mean that we continue to push the boundaries of human longevity. Tomorrow, will we all live as long as the famous French doyenne of humanity, Jeanne Calment? Probably not, even if Californian transhumants still dream of transplanting brains into new bodies.

But what really is the maximum, ultimate life expectancy of our species? Advances in our knowledge of aging and genetics allow us to know more. Singaporean researchers come from elsewhere publish in Nature an in-depth study of the limits of human life. To do this, they looked at the aging of a large sample of the population in the United States and Great Britain.

A decreasing degree of resilience

Thus, based on each person’s level of physical activity and blood test, these scientists believe they have managed to determine the degree of “resilience” of our body. Indeed, and you just have to look at the passage of time to see it, the older we get, the longer it takes our body to recover from fatigue, stress or health problems.

The researchers estimated this degree of resilience on average at 2 weeks around the age of 40, but at three times more (6 weeks) from the age of 80, and at two weeks more (8 weeks) at the age of 90. If this seems rational, it is also scientifically proven. Still according to these researchers, this capacity for resilience ends up disappearing entirely at an age between 120… and 150 years old!

Slow down the process

This threshold would therefore be, they believe, the absolute limit of the lifespan of the human species, beyond which our organism cannot recover, and therefore persist. However, this does not prevent specialists in old age from seek to break this limit of human longevity. Comment ? “Aging in humans exhibits universal characteristics common to complex systems operating to the threshold of disintegration, explains Peter Fedichev, co-founder and CEO of Gero. This work demonstrates how concepts borrowed from the physical sciences can be used in biology to probe different aspects of senescence and frailty in order to produce strong interventions against aging. »

“This investigation shows that the rate of resilience constitutes an important signature of aging which can guide the development of drugs to slow down the process and therefore extend lifespan”says David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, about this study.

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