25
Both. Human cells largely exhibit a phenomenon called senescence - they just give up and die after they reach a certain age via a biochemical mechanism called apoptosis. The outer limit of survivability for human cells is generally understood to be in the 100-120 year range. One of the things that makes a cancer cell cancerous is the deactivation of the ...
12
The claim of modern medicine being responsible for longer lifespans is of course a statistical claim, i.e. the average/net effect. Thus your second assertion does not follow logically. Though it is an interesting point.
Diseases, both now and in the past, do not have 100% mortality rates. If you followed the ebola outbreak you'd have heard stories of ...
9
To date, there has been no randomized clinical trial of low‐volume alcohol consumption that has assessed any mortality outcome. Therefore, the literature about the mortality effects of alcohol consumption consists entirely of observational studies.
Source: Naimi, Timothy S. et al. Selection biases in observational studies affect associations between ‘...
9
This is very good and pragmatic question. I will answer no.
First of all, there are no studies to date which would have investigated the life expectancy after cholecystectomy. Of course this statement can be hardly profoundly backed up, but if you search PubMed with "cholecystectomy AND "life expectancy", none of the studies will look at this issue.
There ...
5
When was congenital-analgesia (aka congenital insensitivity to pain), the inability to feel pain, clinically documented?
It was first reported in 1932 in this paper:
Dearborn, G. V. N. (1932). A case of congenital general pure analgesia. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 75, 612-615. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/00005053-193206000-00002
However, I tried ...
5
No. "The J-curve" was not recently disproven, but the evidence for it slightly
modified. The correlational observation is still that no and low amounts of drinking do not have seriously negative health outcomes associated with them.
What has changed is what conclusions campaigners for "zero alcohol" draw from that evidence.
We do not have any evidence that ...
3
Predicting life expectancy of people currently alive, can, of course, only be speculation, but one based on statistics. If there is a nuclear war next year, the predicted life expectancy will not be accurate.
For the United States, the CDC estimated a life expectancy of about 80 for children born in 2013 (table 16). 71 is the estimated expected life span at ...
3
To answer this question properly is going to need a prospect double blinded controlled trial. That is not going to happen in a normal world.
You can try looking at historical data, like the one referred to in this Huff Post article but that type of restrospective data is highly flawed.
their average non-eunuch contemporaries, who tended to live ...
3
Persons who do regular physical exercise have a lower heart rate while they are resting (or not exercising):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22081187
Hence, their hearts will be beating same number of beats over a longer period of time.
In addition, a number of trials have shown that regular physical exercise is associated with significant health ...
2
A few countries have large long-term databases and studies based on this data:
The heritability of human longevity: A population-based study of 2872 Danish twin pairs born 1870–1900
The Effect of Genetic Factors for Longevity: A Comparison of Identical and Fraternal Twins in the Swedish Twin Registry
There are also lots of review articles on the subject, ...
2
This has to be a speculative answer. Putting a Number on Smoking’s Toll?
Important is this:
People who quit between 25 and 34 years of age gained about 10 years of life compared to those who continued to smoke.
Positive changes are not to be discounted. And stopping reduces risks.
Many current and former smokers want to know their risk of developing ...
1
You've asked how we might calculate (or rather, estimate) the life expectancy of people living in the US in 2025, and provided us with some data that could be relevant. It's understandable that you'd have trouble reflecting on this problem given only the figure included above; among other considerations, you don't have very much data, and the data you've ...
1
Your question is too big to be answered with a formal analysis. So here is a back of the envelope assessment:
[A] We are worse off today (vs. 1900) because of:
tobacco use
obesity
iPods (every adult will be deaf in 20 years)
motor vehicle accidents, gun violence, immense wars
[B] We are better off today (vs. 1900) because of:
better nutrition (hunger ...
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