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BMJ 2002;324:1173 ( 18 May )

News

Life expectancy is consistently underestimated, say researchers

Caroline White, London

Life expectancy has increased by 40 years since 1840 and shows no sign of having peaked, claim population researchers. But governments have planned their health and social policies on projections of life span that are wedded to the concept of maximum longevity, they say.

Writing in the journal Science, the authors, from the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure at Cambridge University and from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, describe the relentless progress as "an extraordinary constancy of human achievement" (Science 2002;296:1029-31)[Abstract/Full Text].

But they say that increases of just a few years in life expectancy can have an enormous impact on health and social services. Increasing prosperity, better nutrition, improvements in public health, and technological advances have fuelled increases in economic output and population size, including a large increase in the number of elderly people. Global life expectancy has more than doubled over the past two centuries.

But forecasts have been based on US projections made in 1928, which predicted that biological and practical impediments would curtail maximum longevity to 65 for both sexes. Non-Maori New Zealand women were already living longer than this in 1921, and by 1996 Japanese women had outlived the revised projection of 85 made in 1990 and 2001.

Women in Japan, followed closely by their French and Swiss peers, now have a 1 in 20 chance of reaching 100.

The inability to accept an increasing life span has precluded empirical and more refined research until the last decade, say the authors.

Although the most recent projections have yet to be surpassed, "continuing belief in imminent limits [to life span] is distorting public and private decision making," they conclude.

One of the authors, Jim Oeppen, from the University of Cambridge, said: "There has been a degree of conspiracy to ignore the problem, because it drives a coach and horses through pension provision, for one thing."

© BMJ 2002
 

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