More of us hitting 100 but jury out on longer human life span

More of us might be making it into our 80s, 90s and even hitting the century, but extending human life beyond that doesn’t appear to be on the cards, a new report finds.

Pauline Potts, still going strong at 105, at a nursing home in Newcastle, on Monday. Picture: Jane Dempster

More Australians are making it into old age and even hitting the century mark, but any idea that humans will live well into the three figures remains in the realm of science fiction – for the present at least.

In the past 50 years, average life expectancy for men in Australia has increased by almost 14 years to 81.3 and by 11.2 years for women to 85.4, but the maximum age of death has shown little change across the decades, an Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report finds.

The AIHW report notes that in the past two decades alone, life expectancy in Australia has been increasing at a rate of three months a year.

And those dying beyond the age of 100 has grown from 83 in 1964 (one in 1214 deaths) to 2247 in 2021 (one in 72 deaths).

Hitting the so-called supercentenarian age of 110 remains an extremely rare event, both here and internationally, it has found, with just two such deaths in Australia in the decade beginning 1964 and 31 in the past decade, suggesting there is a biological limit to the human lifespan.

“We know average life ­expectancy keeps on increasing, but what is interesting is that the maximum age people live to isn’t changing nearly as much,” AIHW spokesman Richard Juckes said.

“The oldest living person in Australia was female and believed to have died at age 114 in 2002. In comparison, the oldest living Australian male died at 111 years in 2021,” Mr Juckes said.

The AIHW report – “How long can Australians live?” – notes the average age of the 10 most elderly deaths in the ’60s ranged from 101.6 to 104.4 years for males and 103.5 to 105.8 years for females. In the decade to 2021, the range was 104.7 to 107.3 years for males and 107.8 to 109.9 years for females.

The oldest living person globally is believed to have died at 122 years in 1997 in France.

At 105 as of last month, Pauline Potts is now in the rarefied area of being a semi-supercentenarian.

Mrs Potts said she’d been blessed with a lucky life and her younger self would not recognise the world as it existed today.

 

Growing up in Sydney and on the NSW central coast and now living at a Hammondcare nursing home in Newcastle, Mrs Potts said the secret to her longevity was living a normal life, “perhaps with a bit more activity during WWII,” she said.

“Of course I didn’t expect to still be here.”

So much has changed in the course of her life, from transport to communications to the cities we live in. When she lived in Concord in Sydney’s inner west, she used to catch the ferry from Cabarita into a city she says is now completely unrecognisable.

“It‘s altogether different from when I was a child,” she said. “I wouldn’t recognise it as the same world.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is Mrs Potts’s keen sense of ­humour. When asked what it felt like reaching the extraordinary milestone, she replied “much like 104”.

The AIHW report notes Australia’s climbing life expectancy, currently 83.2, sits fifth among the 38 nations in the OECD, behind only Japan, Switzerland, South Korea and Spain. However, our birthrate recently hit its lowest on record, just 1.58 births per woman, in 2020, likely impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

While life expectancy is high, more than a decade of an average life will likely be spent in less than full health, according to a 2019 Global Burden of Disease Study, with the “health-adjusted life expectancy” for Australian men sitting at 69 and at 71.7 for women.

The AIHW report attributes Australia’s rising life expectancy to “improved medical knowledge and technology, the widespread availability of antibiotics and ­vaccines, healthcare availability and access, improved living conditions and overall increasing wealth”.

In the past 20 years, the reduction in young people dying in motor vehicle accidents and older people dying from heart ­disease have further boosted life expectancies.

But this has not been matched by a rise in maximum life span.

“(The data) suggests that mortality is being compressed into older ages and may be slowly ­converging towards a maximum age at death rather than a ­situation where maximum life span is increasing along with average life expectancy,” the report notes.

“There is ongoing debate on whether there is a biological limit to the human life span.”

Life expectancy has been somewhat affected by the global Covid-19 pandemic, the report notes.

Australia saw unusually low mortality in 2020 as fewer people died of the flu and comparatively few died of Covid, then higher than expected mortality in 2021 when the impact of Covid was more keenly felt.