It is not the first time that it is warned that reaching 100 years will be challenging. In our country, at the beginning of 2024, more than 15,900 Spaniards surpassed this age, according to the INE. However, from 2011 to 2019, we have stopped adding as many years as we did from 1990 to the second decade of the 21st century. In those first 30 years, around 5.5 years were added, but in the last years, only 1.17 have been gained.
The same situation is happening in other European countries, with the deceleration being more pronounced in the UK and Greece. Only Norway, Iceland, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden are exempt. An analysis published in The Lancet Public Health shows that the average annual improvement in life expectancy in 20 European countries dropped from 0.23 years annually between 1990-2011 to 0.15 years between 2011-2019. It also analyzes the impact of the pandemic, which slowed down the increase in longevity in many European countries, with many experiencing declines in this indicator during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019-2021).
In this regard, our country has recovered. "Yes, it has because the socio-sanitary conditions prior to the pandemic were good and have been maintained," says Marta González Touya, spokesperson for the Spanish Society of Public Health and Health Administration (Sespas). This assessment aligns with the conclusions drawn from the research using data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors 2021 Study (GBD2021).
The increase in life expectancy has slowed down and, in most cases, has decreased in European countries between 1990 and 2021. The stagnation of progress in reducing deaths from major causes of cardiovascular diseases and cancer is attributed to changes in the population's exposure to common risk factors: obesity, diabetes, smoking, sedentary lifestyle, addictions, and pollution. "Our habits are different from previous generations, such as diet and exposure to toxins, and have a long-term impact on our health," says González.
What is slowing down the increase in longevity?
To accelerate longevity again, the authors demand stronger government policies to address overweight and obesity, improve levels of physical activity, and ensure access to healthcare in countries with stagnant or decreasing life expectancy to improve the population's long-term health and reverse these trends.
At the same time, they denounce the influence of four industrial sectors (tobacco, ultra-processed foods, fossil fuels, and alcohol) responsible for at least a third of global deaths, and how their lobbies tend to hinder the implementation of effective policies to mitigate risks.
Óscar Zurriaga states that "this article highlights the deceleration in the progress made in improving life expectancy in most countries included in the study." The associate professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Food Sciences, Toxicology, and Forensic Medicine at the University of Valencia points out to SMC "the importance of political interventions," because "if they include addressing commercial health determinants, reducing dietary risks, improving levels of physical activity, and ensuring access to effective medical care for prevention and treatment, they can achieve improvements in life expectancy."
Here, the authors emphasize that trends to help countries' longevity depend on significant long-term political interventions, implying that "governments can substantially influence adding years to their population," as González explains, through key decisions that should include "addressing commercial health determinants, reducing dietary risks, improving levels of physical activity, and ensuring access to effective healthcare for prevention and treatment."
"The analysis also highlights the changes in life expectancy at birth during the pandemic, which we already knew well from other studies, so the major contribution is connecting these changes during the pandemic with what came before: a slowdown in improvements in the mortality of the European population in general," says Usama Bilal, associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and co-director of the Urban Health Collaborative and the Center for Research on Climate Change and Urban Health at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. At the same time, he points out that the quality of the data "helps to have a complete picture of the mortality profile over 32 years," as reported by SMC.
According to Jesús Adrián Álvarez, an actuary specializing in longevity at ATP Pension Fund and a member of the board of the Danish Demographic Society, "however, we must not lose sight that fluctuations in longevity are normal throughout history. There have been periods of rapid progress and others of slower growth. This does not mean that life expectancy cannot increase again."
Precedents in the deceleration of life expectancy
This work complements the data analysis published a few months ago by the team of S. Jay Olshansky, professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago (USA) in Nature Aging, which concluded that the increase in human life expectancy had slowed down. They studied the mortality data from the nine regions with the highest current life expectancies (including Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain) to compare them with those of the United States between 1990 and 2019.
During the 20th century, improvements in public health and medicine led to increases in human life expectancy of around three years per decade in long-lived populations. However, predicting how life expectancy will evolve during this century has been a topic of debate. Some predictions from the 1990s suggested that long-lived populations were approaching an upper limit of life expectancy, but others predicted that most children born in the 21st century would live to be 100 years or older.