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Life Expectancy
Humanity is hitting the upper limit of life expectancy, according to a new study. Advances in medical technology and genetic research not to mention larger numbers of people making it to age 100 are not not translating into marked jumps in lifespan overall, according to researchers who found shrinking longevity increases in countries with the longest-living populations. We have to recognise there's a limit and perhaps reassess assumptions about when people should retire and how much money they'll need to live out their lives, said S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois-Chicago researcher who was lead author of the study published Monday by the journal Nature Aging. Mark Hayward, a University of Texas researcher not involved in the study, called it a valuable addition to the mortality literature. "We are reaching a plateau" in life expectancy, he agreed. It's always possible some breakthrough could push survival to greater heights, but we don't have that now, Hayward said. Wh
Cutting down smoking to five per cent of current rates by 2050 would increase life expectancy by a year among men and 0.2 years in women, according to recent global modelling studies published in The Lancet Public Health journal. The researchers found that based on current trends, smoking rates around the world could continue to reduce to 21 per cent in men and about four per cent in women by 2050. Along with improving life expectancy, accelerating efforts to eliminate tobacco smoking could avoid 876 million years of lives lost to death, researchers forming the Global Burden of Disease, Injuries and Risk Factors (GBD) Tobacco Forecasting Collaborators said. They also found that banning sales of cigarettes and other tobacco products could prevent 1.2 million lung cancer deaths across 185 countries by 2095. Of these deaths, nearly two-thirds would be averted in low- and middle-income countries, because they tend to have more younger populations compared to high-income ones, the author
Global life expectancy dropped by 1.6 years between 2019 and 2021, a sharp reversal from past improvements, according to a research published in The Lancet journal. One of the first to fully evaluate demographic trends in the context of the first two years of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, the study has published findings, which researchers said, could have implications for health systems, economies and societies around the world. The findings also included those of an ageing worldwide population. The study found that life expectancy declined in 84 per cent of countries and territories during this time. This demonstrated the "devastating potential impacts of novel pathogens", the researchers said. Places such as Mexico City, Peru and Bolivia experienced some of the largest drops, the study found. The researchers also found a marked increase in adult mortality rates globally during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, reversing past decreasing trends. However, child mortality cont
US life expectancy rose last year by more than a year but still isn't close to what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2022 rise was mainly due to the waning pandemic, Centres for Disease Control and Prevention researchers said on Wednesday. But even with the large increase, US life expectancy is only back to 77 years, 6 months about what it was two decades ago. Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live, assuming the death rates at that time hold constant. The snapshot statistic is considered one of the most important measures of the health of the US population. The 2022 calculations released Wednesday are provisional, and could change a little as the math is finalized. For decades, US life expectancy rose a little nearly every year. But about a decade ago, the trend flattened and even declined some years a stall blamed largely on overdose deaths and suicides. Then came the coronavirus, which has killed
COVID-19 has caused a prolonged decline in life expectancy levels, leading to global mortality changes unprecedented in the last 70 years, according to a study. The researchers from the University of Oxford, UK, and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany used data from 29 countries in Europe, as well as Chile and the US. The study, published on Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, found that life expectancy in 2021 remained lower than expected across all 29 countries, had pre-pandemic trends continued. Previous global epidemics have seen fairly rapid "bounce backs" to life expectancy levels, the researchers said. However, the scale and magnitude of COVID-19, on mortality, confounds claims it has had no more impact than a flu-like illness, they said. The researchers noted that life expectancy losses during recurring flu epidemics over the second-half of the 20th century have been much smaller and less widespread than those seen in the pandemic. A clear .