As we get older, our chances of dying go up. To that, you might say, well, duh. But, when we hit around 80 years old or so, a funny thing seems to happen: Our odds of dying stop increasing and instead start leveling out. So you’ve got the same shot — about 50/50 — of croaking at, say, 110 (an age that would classify you as a so-called supercentenarian) as you would at 95.
It’s an odd phenomenon that’s left experts puzzled for years. Researchers have floated many theories to try and explain it. For instance, some think maybe there’s some evolutionary quirk that allows this to happen. Others posit that maybe there’s some cellular funniness afoot, allowing people of extreme old age to somehow accumulate damage more slowly in their cells.
But some experts contend that maybe this human mortality plateau isn’t happening at all. A new paper in PLOS Biology argues that most — if not all — of the proposed observations of so-called late-life mortality plateaus could be chalked up to scientific error.
