Reports of Americans living beyond the ripe old age of 100, it appears, were greatly exaggerated.
The Census Bureau predicted six years ago that the country would be home to 114,000 centenarians by 2010. The actual number was 53,364, the census reported recently. That represented an increase of 5.8% since 2000, compared with a 9.7% gain in the country’s population as a whole.
The figures challenged assumptions that increasing life expectancy will mean more US residents living into their 100s. The oldest human, who lived to 122, died back in 1997: Jeanne Louise Calment sold canvas to van Gogh at her family’s fabric store in Arles, France.
”Here we have 6.9 billion people and no one has come close, survival-wise, to this one lady almost 15 years ago,” said Tom Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at the Boston University School of Medicine.
”That should give you an indication of how incredibly rare it is. We really are hitting a plateau.”
Life expectancy increased from 51.5 years for a man born in 1900 to 80.1 years for a man born in 2001, according to the Social Security Administration. But some demographers and researchers say the century mark may be tougher for humans to reach than previously imagined.
In 1961, Leonard Hayflick, a professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered what is now known as The Hayflick Limit — that cells age as they divide only a fixed number of times. He said the technological gains made during the 1900s are one-time improvements in health that can’t be duplicated.