According to a new study, there is an age limit beyond which the human body no longer holds up: it would be our biological expiration date.
How long can a human being live before his vital functions cease irremediably and irreversibly? It may seem like an idle question but it is actually a question that has been at the center of debates and studies for decades; the average age of a human being is easy to calculate, but it is a value influenced by a myriad of external factors: how long could we last if we never got sick and our bodies always worked perfectly?
(ALMOST) FOREVER. There is a current of thought that argues that the answer is “potentially forever”, and that there are no biological limits to immortality, only practical problems that are more or less inevitable. Other studies, such as the one recently published in Nature Communications , say instead that the limit exists, and that it is possible to calculate it: according to what the researchers of the Singapore biotech company Gero who conducted the study write, it is between 120 and 150 years.
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The only way to try to calculate the “maximum life” of a human body is, of course, starting from the data we have available: the average age of our species under current conditions, for example, and what we know about diseases and about the healing processes that take place within us when we fight them. The team made its calculations starting from a very simple datum: the blood tests of the approximately 500,000 subjects studied. In particular, they took into consideration two elements: the presence in the blood of two different categories of white blood cells, and the differences in the size of red blood cells. In both cases, we are talking about numbers that increase with age (for example, the older a person the more likely their red blood cells are to be of different sizes),
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Each subject of the study was subjected to numerous blood tests, to study the variation with time of these two values, and therefore to be able to build a model that describes aging. According to the authors, with the passing of the years our body takes more and more time to recover its original state after an illness or injury (in practice to heal), and at a certain point the recovery time is too long: initially it becomes impossible to recover at 100%, after which it does not reach 90%, then it falls below 80% … until, quite simply, our body can no longer take it and ceases to function.
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THE COUNTDOWN. According to the study, this “biological countdown” would allow us at most between 120 and 150 years, after which it becomes biologically impossible to survive (a result which is also similar to that obtained by another study dated 2016 ). These are obviously “guessed” numbers, obtained from predictions made by a mathematical model based on the data in our possession; but it’s still an interesting result, because it establishes the existence of a biological “expiration date” for our body.