Limits to Human Life Span Through Extreme Value Theory

There is no scientific consensus on the fundamental question whether the probability distribution of the human life span has a finite endpoint or not and, if so, whether this upper limit changes over time. Our study uses a unique dataset of the ages at death—in days—of all (about 285,000) Dutch residents, born in the Netherlands, who died in the years 1986–2015 at a minimum age of 92 years and is based on extreme value theory, the coherent approach to research problems of this type. Unlike some other studies, we base our analysis on the configuration of thousands of mortality data of old people, not just the few oldest old. We find compelling statistical evidence that there is indeed an upper limit to the life span of men and to that of women for all the 30 years we consider and, moreover, that there are no indications of trends in these upper limits over the last 30 years, despite the fact that the number of people reaching high age (say 95 years) was almost tripling. We also present estimates for the endpoints, for the force of mortality at very high age, and for the so-called perseverance parameter. Supplementary materials for this article, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work, are available as an online supplement.

关于人类寿命概率分布是否具有有限终点这一基本问题，科学界尚无定论，且即便存在这样的上限，该上限是否随时间变化亦未可知。本研究采用了一项独特的数据集，该数据集记录了所有（约285,000名）在荷兰出生并在1986年至2015年间去世的荷兰居民的死亡年龄——以天数计算——且这些居民的去世年龄至少为92岁。本研究基于极值理论，即此类研究问题的连贯性方法。与某些其他研究不同，我们的分析基于数千份老年人死亡数据配置，而不仅仅是少数长寿者的数据。我们发现，对于我们所考虑的30年间，男性以及女性的寿命确实存在一个上限，并且，尽管达到高龄（例如95岁）的人数几乎翻了两番，但这些上限在过去30年中并未显示出任何趋势。此外，我们还提供了寿命终点、极高年龄时的死亡率以及所谓的坚持参数的估计。本文的补充材料，包括可用于复现工作的标准化材料描述，均可作为在线补充材料获取。