A group of researchers from Singapore are exploring the question what’s the longest life that could be lived by a human system. The researchers from Singapore-based biotech company Gero point to an underlying “pace of ageing” that sets the lifespan between 120-150 years.
In the journal which is named as “Longitudinal analysis of blood, markers reveal progressive loss of resilience and predict human lifespan limit and that death is an intrinsic biological property that is independent of stress factors.
According to the researchers, the ‘loss of resilience’ has been found to be the main cause for death in absence of other obvious reasons, like murder, fatal accidents or deadly diseases. Resilience is the body’s capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.
Study co-author Peter Fedichev, who founded Gero said “although most biologists would view blood cell counts and step counts as pretty different, the fact that both sources paint exactly the same future suggests that this pace-of-ageing component is real.”
The more interesting observation of the research included the fact that resilience starts declining steeply somewhere in the mid-thirties to mid-forties with the body slowly losing its ability to cope and recover from stress.
“This work explains why even the most effective prevention and treatment of age-related diseases could only improve the average but not the maximal lifespan unless true antiaging therapies have been developed,” added US-based co-author Andrei Gudkov, from the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Centre.
The research estimates that somewhere between the ages of 120 years to 150 years, human resilience is completely gone. “Ageing in humans exhibits universal features common to complex systems operating on the brink of disintegration,” the researchers said in a statement.
The researchers are of the opinion that to increase our life span, changes need to be made in our resilience factor and in the ageing process. Otherwise, the change will only be an ‘incremental increase in human longevity’.
It is to be noted that the oldest person on record to have ever lived, Jeanne Calment, died at the age of 122 in France.
