Researchers Believe There's A 'Maximum Age' Humans Can Live To

I guess it's a big question, isn't it, how long you'd actually want to live for?

As much as life is fun when you're young, once you get to an age where you're life is plagued by back aches, erectile dysfunction and memory loss - would you really want to keep on going forever?

Well, according to statistician Professor John Einmahl, that's not something any of us have to worry about just yet. Their research conducted on 75,000 Dutch people who died over the past 30 years has estimated that the maximum human lifespan is around 115 years.

Although over that three decade time-frame the age that we live to on average has increased, he believes that the cap of how long are capable of living for has remained the same.

Professor Einmahl and his colleagues at the Department of Econometrics at Tilburg University found the ceiling for human lifespan is 115.7 years for women and 114.1 years for men.

"On average, people live longer, but the very oldest among us have not gotten older over the last thirty years," Einmahl told AFP. "Nevertheless, the maximum ceiling itself hasn't changed."

Credit: PA Images

Researchers in America came to a similar conclusion last year, they said that the maximum lifespan reached a plateau in the nineties, and 115 was as high as it would go.

"Demographers, as well as biologists, have contended there is no reason to think that the ongoing increase in maximum lifespan will end soon," senior author of that study, Jan Vijg, said last year. "But our data strongly suggest that it has already been attained and that this happened in the 1990s."

However, this research is contridicted by Indonesian Mbah Gotho who died last year, supposedly at the age of 146 years old.

Credit: PA Images

Mbah, from Central Java, came forward last year with documentation showing he was born 31 January 1870, making him the oldest person in the world. Naturally, many refused to believe Mbah, who was a heavy smoker, but Indonesian officials claimed the papers were legit.

Indonesia only began recording births in 1900, so there's a chance mistakes could have been made before then.

Featured Image Credit: PA Images

Topics: Death

James Dawson

James Dawson is a Journalist at LADbible. He has contributed articles to LADbible’s ‘Knowing Me, Knowing EU’ series on the EU referendum, the 'Electoral Dysfunction' series on the 2017 general election, the ‘U OK M8?’ series tackling mental health amongst young men, and for its ‘Climate Change’ initiative in partnership with National Geographic.

@thejaytoday