A Reminder of the Trend
From WebMD a reminder that life expectancy has increased, is increasing, and will continue to increase in the future: "Life expectancy worldwide has been rising pretty steadily since 1840, at a rate of about two years per decade. In 1840, the longest-living people in the world were women in Sweden, and they lived an average of 45 years. ... James Vaupel, who directs the laboratory of survival and longevity at Rostock, Germany's Max Planck Institute, has written that advances in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of age-related diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, will usher in an age where every second child born in the industrialized world has an even chance of reaching the century mark. ... Although the belief that old-age mortality is intractable remains widespread, life expectancy is not approaching a limit ... Older people today are able to remain functionally independent much longer than in the past."
Link: http://www.webmd.com/content/article/128/117137.htm?printing=true