Headline July 16, 2018/ " ' WELL 123+ THEN ' "

" ' WELL 123+ THEN ' "

HARVARD UNIVERSITY medical students training with veterinarians at zoo found and saw many, many human parallels? Hope to cover that in the near future.

122 : JEANNE CALMENT set a record for human life span, dying at the age of 122. And this latest research study finds that there is no limit to how long we can live.

Since 1900, average life expectancy around the globe has more than doubled, thanks to better public health sanitation and food supplies.

It's long been known that the death rate starts out somewhat high in infancy and falls during the early years of life.

It climbs again among people in their thirties, finally skyrocketing among those in their in their seventies and eighties.

If the death rate exponentially climbing in extreme old age, then the human life span really would have the sort of limit proposed by the Einstein team in 2018.

But that's not what Dr. Barbi and her colleagues found. Among extremely old Italian, they discovered the death rates stops rising - the curve abruptly flattens into a plateau.

The researchers also found that people who were born in later years have a slightly lower mortality rate when they reach 105.

"The plateau is sinking over time," said Kenneth W. Wachter, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author of the new study.

" Improvements in mortality extend even to these extreme ages."

" We're not approaching any maximum life span for humans yet," he added.

Brandon Milholland, a co-author of the study that forced found a limit to human life span, questioned the new paper. The research, he noted, was limited to just seven years in one country.

"You're reducing yourself to a narrow slice of humanity," he said.

Dr. Milholand also took issue with the way the team analyzed data. The team in the new study examined only two possibilities : that the death rate continued its exponential climb or that it turned into a flat plateau.

The truth might be somewhere in between," he said. "It seems rather far-fetched that after increasing exponentially, the chance of dying should suddenly stop in the tracks."

Dr. Hekimi, on the other hand, praised the study for, the quality of its data and called its conclusions, "very interesting and surprising ".

The new research doesn't explain why death rate flattens out in the oldest of the old. One possibility is that some people have genes that make them more frail than others. Frail people die off sooner than more resilient ones, leaving behind a pool of tough seniors.

But Dr, Hekimi speculated that there might be other factors at play.

Throughout our lives, our cells become damaged. We managed to repair them only partially, and over time our bodies grow weak.

It's possible that at the cellular level, very old people simply live at a slower rate. As a result, they accumulate less damage in their cells, which their bodies can repair.

" This is a reasonable theory for which there is no proof," Dr. Hekimi said. "But we can find out if there is. "

A flat death rate doesn't mean that centenarians have found a fountain of youth. From one year to the next, the new study suggests, they still have a much higher chance of dying than people in their nineties.

Exactly how long centenarians live may simply be a roll of the dice each year.

But if even if this turns out to be the case, Jeanne Calment's age won't be easily matched, said Tom Kirkwood, associated dean for aging at Newcastle University, who was not involved in the study.

"The higher the ceiling gets set as records are successfully broken, the harder it gets to break it," he said.

With respectful dedication to the Grandparents, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all "register" on The World Students Society and Twitter - !E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011 :

"' Wind & Wear "'

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