The first link is for an article written for the lay public, or non-scientists. I found the original research and link to it below. The bottom line is that these researchers think there is an absolute limit to human lifespan, but it’s up to 150 years!! A lot has to go right in person to reach that age, no accidents, etc…
There are people with lucky genes that allow long life in spite of these fortunate humans being able to eat, smoke and drink and still live to over 100. The longest lived person on record recently passed away at the age of 122 years.
The science here is based on the concept of resilience, or the ability of the organism to repair and “roll with the punches.” They studied blood cells and could extrapolate that at a certain age, the cells could no longer throw off the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and life would come to an end. No living past somewhere between 120 an 150 years.
For the study, Timothy Pyrkov, a researcher at a Singapore-based company called Gero, and his colleagues looked at this “pace of aging” in three large cohorts in the U.S., the U.K. and Russia. To evaluate deviations from stable health, they assessed changes in blood cell counts and the daily number of steps taken and analyzed them by age groups.
For both blood cell and step counts, the pattern was the same: as age increased, some factor beyond disease drove a predictable and incremental decline in the body’s ability to return blood cells or gait to a stable level after a disruption. When Pyrkov and his colleagues in Moscow and Buffalo, N.Y., used this predictable pace of decline to determine when resilience would disappear entirely, leading to death, they found a range of 120 to 150 years. (In 1997 Jeanne Calment, the oldest person on record to have ever lived, died in France at the age of 122.)
The researchers also found that with age, the body’s response to insults could increasingly range far from a stable normal, requiring more time for recovery. Whitson says that this result makes sense: A healthy young person can produce a rapid physiological response to adjust to fluctuations and restore a personal norm. But in an older person, she says, “everything is just a little bit dampened, a little slower to respond,
Interestingly, I was taught during Acupuncture training and I’ve observed over the years, that older patients require more treatment and more robust treatment than younger people. And children respond the quickest of all.
I made a rudimentary flipbook on Longevity found here.
Pyrkov TV, Avchaciov K, Tarkhov AE, Menshikov LI, Gudkov AV, Fedichev PO. Longitudinal analysis of blood markers reveals progressive loss of resilience and predicts human lifespan limit. Nat Commun. 2021 May 25;12(1):2765. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-23014-1. PMID: 34035236; PMCID: PMC8149842.
We investigated the dynamic properties of the organism state fluctuations along individual aging trajectories in a large longitudinal database of CBC measurements from a consumer diagnostics laboratory. To simplify the analysis, we used a log-linear mortality estimate from the CBC variables as a single quantitative measure of the aging process, henceforth referred to as dynamic organism state indicator (DOSI). We observed, that the age-dependent population DOSI distribution broadening could be explained by a progressive loss of physiological resilience measured by the DOSI auto-correlation time. Extrapolation of this trend suggested that DOSI recovery time and variance would simultaneously diverge at a critical point of 120 − 150 years of age corresponding to a complete loss of resilience. The observation was immediately confirmed by the independent analysis of correlation properties of intraday physical activity levels fluctuations collected by wearable devices. We conclude that the criticality resulting in the end of life is an intrinsic biological property of an organism that is independent of stress factors and signifies a fundamental or absolute limit of human lifespan.
