# Maximum lifespan

Maximum lifespan is the oldest age a member of a species can reach under ideal conditions. It is the documented or theoretical ceiling, not the population's average life expectancy (the age you'd typically plan around). In humans, the record stands at 122 years and 164 days. It was set by the French supercentenarian Jeanne Calment (1875 to 1997). No independently checked case has come close since. Dong, Milholland and Vijg (Nature, 2016) studied global data from the International Database on Longevity. They found that the age of the world's oldest living person plateaued around 115 years after 1995. They concluded that a soft ceiling near 115 to 125 years is biologically set, likely by the molecular and cellular damage that piles up with aging, which no treatment has yet reversed at scale. But this reading is hotly contested. Lenart and Vaupel (Nature, 2017) argued the same data fit continued, if slow, gains in maximum age, and that Calment is an extreme outlier, not proof of a hard limit. Olshansky et al. (Nature Aging, 2024) studied survival in the longest-lived nations. They found life-expectancy gains slowing sharply, and concluded that a radical jump past today's record is unlikely this century without breakthroughs not yet shown in humans. So is maximum lifespan a fixed constant, or a flexible ceiling that geroscience could keep raising? That stays one of the central open questions in aging research.

## Sources

- Dong X, Milholland B, Vijg J. (2016). Evidence for a limit to human lifespan. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19793
- Lenart A, Vaupel JW. (2017). Questionable evidence for a limit to human lifespan. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22790
- Olshansky SJ, Willcox BJ, Demetrius L, Beltrán-Sánchez H. (2024). Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the twenty-first century. Nature Aging. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-024-00702-3

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_Canonical: https://longevity-switzerland.com/en/glossary/maximum-lifespan · Part of Longevity Cities · Updated 2026-06-22_