Researchers believe they have identified the upper limit of human mortality: 150 years old.
This would top the current record for oldest human — Jeanne Calment, who passed away in 1997 at 122 years — but it sure does put a damper on efforts to live forever.
Using an iPhone app and a huge amount of medical data from volunteers in the UK and US, scientists think they’ve confirmed the maximum age people can anticipate ever living to, the researchers wrote in a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
Artificial intelligence analyzed the health- and fitness-related information, and researchers determined that the human lifespan is most significantly based on two data points: biological age (associated with stress, lifestyle and chronic diseases) and resilience (how quickly the person returns to normal after responding to a stressor).
Using these findings and related trends, researchers reckoned that, at around 120 to 150 years old, the human body shows “a complete loss” of resilience, resulting in an inability to recover, according to a press release.
“As we age, more and more time is required to recover after a perturbation, and on average we spend less and less time close to the optimal physiological state,” study author Timothy V. Pyrkov said.
Professor Andrei Gudkov — who works at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, which collaborated on the study — further commented that the finding is “a conceptual breakthrough, because it determines and separates the roles of fundamental factors in human longevity … It explains why even most effective prevention and treatment of age-related diseases could only improve the average, but not the maximal, lifespan, unless true anti-aging therapies have been developed.”
This comes amid a rising trend of biohacking, or using trendy, age-defying practices to lengthen a lifespan. Biohackers have tried everything from fasting to injecting themselves with untested herpes medication.
Last week, real estate tycoon Ari Rastegar, 39, claimed his routine use of things like stem cell therapy and meditation inside a hyperbaric chamber have resulted in him having the biological age of a 5-year-old.
New York Post