US life expectancy edges up -- to 77.4
Live it up! Life just got 73 days longer.
The average person born in the United States can expect to live to the respectable, if not ripe, old age of 77.4 years -- up two-tenths of a year to a record high.
Men still lag years behind women, and blacks continue to trail whites, but the encouraging news is this: People in each group have bought themselves a little more time.
Life expectancy -- a fundamental measure of a society's well-being -- has been climbing steadily for more than a century, thanks in large part to public health advances, such as clean water and antibiotics.
Given how far we've come, it can't be expected to climb much higher -- or can it?
"While we may be experiencing some increases today, unless there's some sort of major medical breakthrough, these increases are going to slow down and probably come to a halt," said S. Jay Olshansky, an epidemiologist at the University of Chicago.
By "breakthrough," Olshansky means something far bigger than finding a cure for America's three leading killers: heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Even wiping out cancer, which causes more than one-quarter of the 2.4 million deaths annually, would add about 3 1/2 years to the country's overall average life expectancy, he said.
The problem is that people who overcome that disease will die of something else. Our bodies, after all, are not built to last.
In extending our life expectancy, we have become victims of our own success. The higher it climbs, specialists say, the harder it will be to record further gains.
"When you save a baby from dying, you add many more years to life. When you save an 80-year-old from dying, by comparison, you add many fewer years to life," Olshansky said. "We've achieved most of the gains that can be achieved by saving the young, and now the vast majority in the rise in life expectancy has to result in saving population over the age of 50."
The new life-expectancy figures, released last month by the federal government, apply to babies born in 2002.
Olshansky predicts that male life expectancy will top out at 82 (now, at birth, males can be expected to live to 74.7), while females will level off at 88 (they are now expected to live to 79.9).
Some demographers have far higher expectations. Aubrey de Grey, a gerontologist at the University of Cambridge in England who is seeking a science-based "cure" for aging, thinks people will live well beyond 100 during this century because of medical advances yet to be made.
The oldest person on record died in 1997 in France at 122.
The way de Grey sees it, science has figured out -- in principle, if not in practice -- how to "fix" all the different kinds of damage that occur in the human body. So fixing the problem of aging will be akin to fixing a roof that leaks or a car engine that dies: Periodically, we'll have to go in for repairs.
He concedes that most people view "life extension" the same way they view being able to, say, teleport themselves across town. They don't think advances made in their lifetimes will affect them or even their children.
"The sea change in attitude will be triggered by results in the laboratory mice," said de Grey, who last year instituted the "Methuselah Mouse Prize," a contest to engineer the oldest-living mouse. "That could happen certainly within 10 years."
Life expectancy in the United States in 1900, at birth, was 47.3 years.
When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, it had risen to 73.7. During the more than two decades since, as disease detection and treatment have improved, life expectancy has climbed another 3.7 years. 