For the elderly, life becomes increasingly precarious: Getting the flu could be life-threatening; a simple fall can be life-ending. (Falls are now the leading cause of accidental death for this age group in the U.S.) A study published in Science last week challenges this intuition: The team of scientists led by Elisabetta Barbi, a demographer from Sapienza University, claims that life actually ceases to be increasingly dangerous after a certain age. The finding is nonintuitive and interesting, but the reporting on it has been a bit fantastical. To take a representative example from Nature’s coverage of this work: “That would mean that someone like Chiyo Miyako, … the world’s oldest known person, could live for years to come—or even forever, at least hypothetically.” But despite these sorts of claims, the finding itself has no such implication. Chiyo Miyako—like the 100 billion homo sapiens who came before and all those who will come after—will definitely die someday, just like the rest of us.
from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2lNxm6t
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