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Could You Live to Be 200? A New Study Says There's No Limit to How Old People Can Get
The oldest person ever lived to be 122, so it SEEMS like that's the limit to aging . . . or SOMEONE out of the billions of people in history would've passed it.
But according to a new study, that MIGHT not be true. There might not be ANY limit to how old people can get.
The researchers studied data from Italy from 2009 to 2015, and they found a strange phenomenon: As you get older and approach 80, your chances of dying go up a LOT every year. But after 80, those chances basically stop going up.
And if you make it to 105 years old, your chances of dying totally level off. You've got around a 60% chance of passing away every year, but that's it.
Now . . . with that annual 60% chance of dying, eventually those odds catch up with everyone. But, in theory, some lucky person could beat those odds over and over, and with modern medicine, they could make it to 130, 150, 200 . . . who knows?
But before you start making plans for what you're going to do for your 200th birthday party, there are two important catches.
One, this is all still theoretical, since no one's actually lived that long. And two, that study used a pretty small sample, since there just aren't THAT many people over 100 to get data from, so it's not exactly rock solid scientific fact.
(Gizmodo)