Do you want to live forever? Well you can’t! But you just might make it to the age of 150. At least that is what a new study published in the journal Nature Communications says. The study was conducted by scientists working for Gero.
In the Jewish tradition we say “until 120.” This means that a person should be blessed with a long life lasting 120 years. But why 120 years? It is because Moses lived to be exactly 120 years of age. And no one alive today is considered to be anywhere near a holy and righteous enough person on the level of Moses so as to merit a longer life than he. In fact, while many Biblical characters live much longer than that, none of the ones who came after Moses lived longer than he did.
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But should we now begin saying “until 150” instead of “until 120?“ Well maybe not just yet.
Living that long is obviously contingent on a lot of things. First of all, the life expectancy presupposes no serious illnesses. So we are talking about people who suffer from no genetic medical conditions or who don’t get cancer or hepatitis or anything like that. And this also, of course, assumes healthy living.
If you drink, smoke, eat junk and don’t exercise then you probably won’t make it to 150. But even if you lead a completely healthy lifestyle, there are never any guarantees.
So what did the study say, exactly?
According to the new study’s authors, aging is manifested as a progressive functional decline leading to exponentially increasing prevalence and incidence of chronic age-related diseases (e.g., cancers, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, etc.) and disease-specific mortality. All-cause mortality in humans and the incidence of chronic age-related diseases increase exponentially and double every 8 years.
“Calculation of resilience based on physical activity data streams has been implemented in GeroSense iPhone app and made available for the research community via web-based API,” commented the first author of the study, Tim Pyrkov, head of the mHealth project at Gero.
“Aging in humans exhibits universal features common to complex systems operating on the brink of disintegration. This work is a demonstration of how concepts borrowed from physical sciences can be used in biology to probe different aspects of senescence and frailty to produce strong interventions against aging,” said Peter Fedichev, co-founder and CEO of Gero.
But the really good news here is that the limit of 150 years be extended someday. The study’s authors said that no strong life extension is possible by preventing or curing diseases without interception of the aging process, the root cause of the underlying loss of resilience. But they added that they “do not foresee any laws of nature prohibiting such an intervention. Therefore, the aging model presented in this work may guide the development of life-extending therapies with the strongest possible effects on healthspan.”
