So this is it...we're going to die

[andrewducker]

I was reading the Hacker News discussion of yesterday's link on death and doctors' views on it, and came across this comment which highlighted how small the gains in lifespan over the last hundred years are.

Basically, if you were 65 in 1900 then on average you had 12 more years to live. In 2007 you had 19 more years to live*. If you were 85 then you've gone from 4 more years to 6 more years.

So that's an addition of 7 years and 2 years. Which doesn't seem like very much, particularly as I keep hearing about how much better modern life expectancy is.

Does anyone have any better stats than that? Or any stats for life extension gains in other countries than the US?




*That has to be an estimate, what with it not being 2026 yet.

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

there are only 6 living people in the top 100 (and the oldest is at number 15). That wouldn't be the case if we were making dramatic strides here.

Douglas Douglas.. That's because you're only on that list for a small number of years before you die. In fact unless you make the top ten, there's only two years before you entering that top 100 list and you dying. We would not expect many living people to be on that list, it's by definition not a list you can be on for long. There's an equally important problem: data for "living" people is also what we refer to as "right hand censored" -- the living ones are less likely to be near the top of the list because they're not yet dead. (I'm sure you can untangle that to get what I mean more clearly).

What is, actually, much more germaine is that the majority of that list (more than half I think) died in the 2000s. Almost none of them died in the 1980s and only one before then. Only one person who died before you or I were born makes that list and they are disputed -- ISTR my 1979 Guinness book had the oldest person recorded at 113 (disallowing the 1959 death) -- they would not make the top 100, probably not the top 1000.

In 1987 the oldest person recorded was 114. The oldest person now recorded is 122. That's eight years of extra life on the "oldest" record in twenty five years. To me that seems like frighteningly fast progress -- terrifyingly so. Indeed given the theoretical maximum of 1 year onto longest life per year, getting nearly 1/3 of a year onto longest life per year is pretty damned good.

A better reading of that list which reveals more than a count of the living is that unless I slip my count (wholly possible), 1 of them died in 1959 (but that is disptued) 4 of them died in the 1980s, 30 in the 1990s and 44 between 2000 and 2009 (inclusive).