Chance of living to be 120 growing, says US scientist

Actuaries and pension companies may well have trouble facing into their cornflakes this morning with news of the first scientific evidence that people are living longer. The maximum lifespan is on the rise, and attaining the ripe old age of 120 is on the cards.

Demographers from the University of California, Berkeley, and from Sweden based their claim on a study of Swedish national death records stretching back to 1861. The age at death in Sweden has been steadily climbing for 138 years, according to Prof John Wilmoth, of the University of California, Berkeley. The trend has become particularly pronounced since 1970.

He searched through records even earlier than the 1800s in pursuit of record breakers in the age stakes.

The longest-lived person born in 1756, for example, died at 101. The record holder for 1884 had pushed this figure up to 109, he said.

"Human progress is real, somehow," he writes in a research report in the journal, Science. "We are changing the limits of the human life-span over time." For people alive today, the current life-span makes it rare to live past 110 years, he said. "But future generations could have a higher range."

Experts have long believed that the human lifespan was biologically limited to 115 or 120 years, but Prof Wilmoth dismisses this. "Those numbers are out of thin air . . . There is no scientific basis on which to estimate a fixed upper limit."

So why is all this happening? Prof Wilmoth puts it down to better healthcare, clean water and sanitation. Better public health has meant a healthier population in old age.

"The elderly today are benefiting from the fact they were not as sick when they were children as in past generations, and these changes took place 80 to 100 years ago," he concludes.