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MEDICAL RESEARCH
Death rates plateau in elderly people, reviving a debate about how long humans can live.
There might be no natural limit to how long humans can live - at least not one yet in sight.
That proposal - which runs contrary to the claims of some demographers and biologists - comes from a statistical analysis published on 28 June in Science. It examined the probabilities of survival of nearly 4,000 'super-elderly' people in Italy, all aged 105 and older (E. Barbi et al. Science 360, 1459-1461; 2018).
The study was led by Sapienza University demographer Elisabetta Barbi and University of Roma Tre statistician Francesco Lagona, both based in Rome. Their team found that the risk of death - which, throughout most of life, seems to increase as people age - levels off after age 105, creating a 'mortality plateau'. At that point, the researchers say, the odds of someone dying from one birthday to the next are roughly 50:50 (see 'Longevity unlimited').
"If there is a mortality plateau, then there is no limit to human longevity"' says Jean-Marie Robine, a demographer at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Montpellier.
That would mean that someone such as Chiyo Miyako, a Japanese great-great-greatgrandmother who, at 117, is the world's...