as a whole, life expectancy is going up throughout the human age span. Life expectancy at birth is up quite a lot over the decades shown in the charts, but life expectancy at ages 40, 60, 65, and 80 have also increased.
The New England Journal of Medicine has a free access article from earlier this year (to celebrate its 200th anniversary)
with much information on changes in mortality in the United States over the last two centuries.
The current prediction by demographers who specialize in life expectancy research is that a girl born after the year 2000 in a developed country has a 50:50 chance of personally living to the age of 100.
(I'm glad for that news on my daughter's behalf.) That's based on steady improvement in mortality and morbidity outcomes across the age span in those countries, and what can reasonably be expected simply from more thorough provision of existing preventive treatments and treatments of acute and chronic diseases. Already it is hard for twenty-first century Americans to remember that once even kings and queens had many children die in early childhood from communicable diseases, and someday it will be difficult to remember that children ever died from much besides volitional human behavior (accidents, suicide, or homicide), with even those causes of death being in decline.
AFTER EDIT:
Several of the other comments in this thread refer to cancer mortality rates. An excellent article by a cancer researcher, "Why haven’t we cured cancer yet?"
which was submitted to HN when it was first put on the Web, discusses the several reasons why cancer mortality has declined only a little over the last few decades, despite much research devoted to finding more effective treatments for cancer and preventive measures against cancer.
http://www.oecd.org/general/listofoecdmembercountries-ratifi...
as a whole, life expectancy is going up throughout the human age span. Life expectancy at birth is up quite a lot over the decades shown in the charts, but life expectancy at ages 40, 60, 65, and 80 have also increased.
The New England Journal of Medicine has a free access article from earlier this year (to celebrate its 200th anniversary)
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113569
with much information on changes in mortality in the United States over the last two centuries.
The current prediction by demographers who specialize in life expectancy research is that a girl born after the year 2000 in a developed country has a 50:50 chance of personally living to the age of 100.
http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio...
http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....
http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio...
(I'm glad for that news on my daughter's behalf.) That's based on steady improvement in mortality and morbidity outcomes across the age span in those countries, and what can reasonably be expected simply from more thorough provision of existing preventive treatments and treatments of acute and chronic diseases. Already it is hard for twenty-first century Americans to remember that once even kings and queens had many children die in early childhood from communicable diseases, and someday it will be difficult to remember that children ever died from much besides volitional human behavior (accidents, suicide, or homicide), with even those causes of death being in decline.
AFTER EDIT:
Several of the other comments in this thread refer to cancer mortality rates. An excellent article by a cancer researcher, "Why haven’t we cured cancer yet?"
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent-we-...
which was submitted to HN when it was first put on the Web, discusses the several reasons why cancer mortality has declined only a little over the last few decades, despite much research devoted to finding more effective treatments for cancer and preventive measures against cancer.