Maximum life span
[2][3][failed verification] Longevity refers only to the characteristics of the especially long lived members of a population, such as infirmities as they age or compression of morbidity, and not the specific life span of an individual.
According to James Vaupel, "The progress being made in lengthening lifespans and postponing senescence is entirely due to medical and public-health efforts, rising standards of living, better education, healthier nutrition and more salubrious lifestyles.
[10] This law was first quantified in 1939, when researchers found that the one-year probability of death at advanced age asymptotically approaches a limit of 44% for women and 54% for men.
[17] In 2017, the United Nations conducted a Bayesian sensitivity analysis of global population burden based on life expectancy projection at birth in future decades.
The 95% prediction interval of average life expectancy rises as high as 106 years old by 2090, with ongoing and layered effects on world population and demography should that happen.
[19][page needed] On the basis of this hypothesis, athletes with a VO2max value between 50 and 60 at age 20 would be expected "to live for 100 to 125 years, provided they maintained their physical activity so that their rate of decline in VO2max remained constant".
[20] Small animals such as birds and squirrels rarely live to their maximum life span, usually dying of accidents, disease or predation.
[citation needed] The maximum life span of most species is documented in the AnAge repository (The Animal Ageing and Longevity Database).
The longest-lived perennials, woody-stemmed plants such as trees and bushes, often live for hundreds and even thousands of years (one may question whether or not they may die of old age).
Rats, mice, and hamsters experience maximum life-span extension from a diet that contains all of the nutrients but only 40–60% of the calories that the animals consume when they can eat as much as they want.
De Grey has established The Methuselah Mouse Prize to award money to researchers who can extend the maximum life span of mice.
The theory that DNA damage is the primary cause of aging, and thus a principal determinant of maximum life span, has attracted increased interest in recent years.
The first experimental test of this idea was by Hart and Setlow[66] who measured the capacity of cells from seven different mammalian species to carry out DNA repair.
[68] The life span of 13 mammalian species correlated with poly(ADP ribosyl)ation capability measured in mononuclear cells.
