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Lumifer comments on [LINK] Larry = Harry sans magic? Google vs. Death - Less Wrong
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An interesting observation :
"...just two men in the world known to be over 110, compared with 58 women (19 of whom are Japanese, 20 American). By contrast there are now half a million people over 100, and the number is growing at 7 per cent a year. For all the continuing improvements in average life expectancy, the maximum age of human beings seems to be stuck. It’s still very difficult even for women to get to 110 and the number of people who reach 115 seems if anything to be falling."
That is not encouraging for challenging aging.
This post, based on this model suggests that mortality rate is doubling every 8 years or so (I think it was discussed on LW and written up on gwern.net before), possibly due to the linear decline in the immune system function with age. Thus finding a way to keep the immune system ship-shape could make a drastic difference in life expectancy.
No, just LW: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5qm/living_forever_is_hard_or_the_gompertz_curve/
As for the amyloidosis thing - it's interesting but the sample is very small and I don't understand why Coles thinks there may be causality rather than him just finding a random biomarker correlate (none of his GRG emails help here either).
I'm also a bit skeptical about claims of the centenarian death rates flattening out and ceasing to follow a Gompertz curve since this sort of dieback may be fitting the population better to the curve...
I agree that keeping the immune system well-functioning is very important.
However, from the same link as above:
"Professor Coles has done 11 autopsies on supercentenarians and finds that most die of congestive heart failure secondary to “systemic TTR amyloidosis”, a thickening of the blood. The rest tend to inhale food particles and get pneumonia. It is not really clear why women live longer than men; probably something to do with their having a different cocktail of steroid hormones."
Amyloidosis is basically proteins which are normally soluble becoming insoluble and accumulating in intracellular space, etc. That's essentially wear and tear, not an immune system failure. On the other hand pneumonia is a pretty clear immune system failure.