A study counts blood cells and footsteps to predict our maximum lifespan.

A famous phrase by Frank Lloyd W., "The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes..." is a desired remark to cherish every moment of our fleeting life. The pursuit of longevity or immortality, which began in the ages of kings and dynasties, continues to this day, notably in the technological sector. Immortality is occasionally elevated to the rank of a bodily desire in Silicon Valley. Big money is being invested in several new companies that are attempting to address the problem of death.

But what if, despite our best efforts, death is simply impossible to avoid, and the length of life would always be limited? Researchers are increasingly focusing on the issue of how long we can live if, because of a confluence of luck and genetics, we avoid passing away from diseases like cancer, heart disease, or being hit by a bus. They claim that our body's ability to balance its numerous structural and metabolic systems following disruptions nevertheless diminishes with time, even when items that would normally kill us are excluded. And even if we manage to live a stress-free life, this gradual deterioration limits the maximum lifespan of humans to between 120 and 150 years. In their findings, which were published in May 2021 in Nature Communications, the researchers draw the conclusion that, in the end, if the obvious dangers do not claim our lives, this underlying lack of resilience will.

According to Heather Whitson, director of the Duke University Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, who was not involved in the paper, "They are asking the question of what is the longest life that could be lived by a human complex system if everything else went really well, and it's in a stressor-free environment?" The team's findings suggest an underlying "pace of aging" that establishes life expectancy boundaries, she says.

Timothy Pyrkov, a researcher at the Singapore-based Gero, and his coworkers examined this "pace of aging" in three sizable cohorts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia for the study. They measured variations in blood cell counts and the daily number of steps taken and divided the results by age groups to determine deviations from stable health.

The trend was the same for both blood cell and step counts: as age increased, some non-disease factor led a predictable and progressive loss in the body's capacity to restore blood cells or gait to a stable level following a disruption. Pyrkov discovered a range of 120 to 150 years when he and his colleagues in Buffalo, New York, and Moscow used this predictable pace of deterioration to calculate when resilience would completely vanish and result in death. (Jeanne Calment, who had previously held the record for living the longest, passed away in France in 1997 at the age of 122.)

The researchers also discovered that as one gets older, the body's response to insults can deviate from a stable baseline, necessitating greater time for recuperation. This result, according to Whitson, makes sense: a healthy young person may develop a quick physiological reaction to adjust to changes and restore a personal norm. "Everything is just a little bit dampened, a little slower to respond, and you can get overshoots," she says, referring to when an illness causes substantial changes in blood pressure.

The yearning to discover the secrets of immortality has most certainly existed for as long as humans have been aware of death. However, a long-life span is not the same as a long health span, according to S. Jay Olshansky, an epidemiology and biostatistics professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in the study. "The emphasis should be on living healthier longer rather than living longer," he says.

"Death is not the only thing that matters," adds Whitson. "Other things, such as quality of life, start to matter more and more as people lose them." She describes the death modeled in this work as "the ultimate lingering death." And the challenge is, "Can we extend life without also extending the proportion of time in which people are frail?" We feel that extending your longevity, health-span, and joy-span is worth fighting for, given that the average human nowadays only lives half the years that researchers estimate we can. Of course, everyone who wants to pursue it will have to make a conscious effort and Age In Reverse is here to help you with that.