If one were to judge by splashy headlines alone, it would be easy to imagine that humans are living for longer than ever before. The field of longevity medicine has sparked widespread fascination, spurred on by billionaires spending their vast wealth on experimental treatments in a quest to live forever. Interest in biological age, which denotes the physical rather than chronological age of body and brain, has ramped up, while places with the highest concentration of centenarians have been dubbed “Blue Zones” and studied to determine whether these people hold the key to unlocking eternal life.
However, behind all the cutting-edge epigenetic testing and space-age supplements lies a very different truth. We are not, in fact, living for longer. On the contrary: life expectancy in the UK and other advanced nations across the world is stalling.
Life expectancy is a measurement that estimates, at birth, how many years the average person might be expected to live based on current mortality rates. Over the past 150 years or so, this projected number rose significantly. A man and woman born in England in 1841 could reasonably expect to live to the unripe old age of 40.2 and 42.3 years old respectively. By 1920, this had risen to 55.8 and 58.7, thanks to widespread improvements in nutrition, hygiene, housing, sanitation and control of infectious diseases. Post-Second World War, gains continued to be made, and by the turn of the century, life expectancy had rocketed to 76.6 for males and 80.4 for females. Childhood immunisations, universal health care, medical advances in treating heart disease and cancer and a stark decline in smoking all played a significant role.
But improvement started to slow around the 2010 mark. Life expectancy had climbed again in the previous decade to 79 for men and 83 for women, but by 2019, this had only risen marginally. Then came 2020 and the Covid pandemic. The huge spike in “excess” deaths – the term denoting the number of deaths above the five-year average – totalled more than 167,000 in England and Wales between March 2020 and December 2022. Life expectancy consequently went down for the first time in a decade.
The fall was understandable, but it doesn’t change the fact that the country had already been stagnating. And we weren’t the only ones: a major study published in The Lancet earlier this year found that, all across Europe, improvement in life expectancy had significantly slowed between 2011 and 2019. Of the 20 countries studied, every single one saw life expectancy growth fall, barring Norway.
This can be explained, to some extent, by previous leaps in medical progress – the “spectacular advances we saw in public health measures, medical technologies and treatments for cardiovascular disease and cancer in the late 20th and early 21st century”, which had a “very sharp impact” on reducing mortality, says Dr Veena Raleigh, an epidemiologist and senior fellow with The King’s Fund who specialises in public health and health inequalities.
Meanwhile, the timing of the slowdown also points to the 2008 global financial crisis having a knock-on effect, claims David Finch, assistant director at the Health Foundation. “Two things stem from that: firstly, a shock to living standards,” he says. “We know that the incomes we have, the access to goods and services, are real drivers of the extent to which we can support our health.” In tandem, governments were scrambling to get back on an even keel by reducing public spending and implementing austerity policies of varying severity. Historically, gains in life expectancy have gone hand-in-hand with rises in nationwide living standards. It stands to reason that the inverse of this might harm life expectancy.
Geopolitics and economics aside, some slackening in longevity isn’t necessarily unexpected, according to Nir Barzilai, president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research and director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He explains that, for thousands of years of human evolution, life expectancy remained at a similar level – around 30 to 35 – only significantly increasing since the mid to late 19th century. “At a certain point, we started getting age-related diseases that hadn’t been part of evolution, because we were living for longer: Alzheimer’s, heart disease, cancer. That’s not what killed people before; they died from infection, wars and killing each other.”
While we have seen huge advancements in treating these illnesses, there is still a biological ceiling we’ll naturally hit in terms of mortality. “We have a maximal lifespan as a species,” says Barzilai. “Every animal does. Mice, with the biggest intervention, cannot live over four years. They usually live two.”
When we start getting closer to the ceiling, progress will decelerate and the line of the life expectancy graph will start to plateau. “We’re starting to bend the curve, right?” adds Barzilai. “If we really could live forever, we would say the graph should keep going up. But if there’s a limit, it starts to bend.”
That’s not to say there isn’t room for further advancement. Some scientists have posited that the current cut-off sits at about 115 years (though there are always outliers – the maximum human lifespan ever recorded stands at 122). “If our current potential is 115 and we’re dying at 80, there are 35 extra years that could be realised, and we should start with that – we’ll make a lot of progress treating those years,” says Barzilai. Meanwhile, analyses using two different types of modelling, the Gompertz equation and dynamic organisms state indicator, have put the absolute maximum potential human lifespan at 140 and 150 years, respectively.
If our current potential is 115 and we’re dying at 80, there are 35 extra years that could be realised
Nir Barzilai, Academy for Health and Lifespan Research
While the idea of this becoming a reality may belong to some distant, sci-fi future, what should concern us in the here and now is how the UK’s progress, or lack thereof, compares on a global scale. Within the Lancet study, England was identified as the sick man of Europe, having experienced the most sluggish growth in life expectancy, closely followed by the other UK nations of Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Since 2010, moderate improvements in life expectancy have been seen in other comparable countries, but markedly not in the UK.
“Countries like Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium held on to better life expectancy after 2011, and saw reduced harms from major risks for heart disease, helped by government policies,” said Professor Nicholas Steel of UEA’s Norwich Medical School, lead researcher on the study. “In contrast, England and the other UK nations fared worst after 2011 and also during the Covid pandemic.” He added that England wasn’t “doing so well” when it came to heart disease and cancer and that these trends are “decades long – there isn’t a quick fix.”
The difference between the UK and Japan, which boasts one of the highest life expectancies in the world, is currently more than four and a half years for females, according to data published by World Population Review. This is no accident, according to Raleigh; the 2010s were typified by severe austerity. “The public health budget was cut by about a quarter between 2015 and the early 2020s,” she explains. “The NHS was under tremendous strain. Health inequalities were widening and, of course, that affects the average life expectancy.”
There are yawning chasms in UK longevity based on geography. Life expectancy in the most deprived places like Blackpool is similar to that of Bangladesh; the richest regions enjoy numbers on a par with Japan. OECD figures suggest that the UK has among the highest levels of income inequality in the European Union.
Many deaths remain potentially “preventable”, a term used when they’re caused by modifiable risk factors such as obesity or smoking. This is also strongly tied to inequality; the prevalence of smoking is four times higher, and childhood obesity is over twice as high, in England’s most deprived areas compared to its most affluent.
And when we look at poor health and increased mortality, it’s not just in older people with age-related diseases where the UK is falling short. As of early 2025, a record-breaking number of working-age people are out of work due to long-term ill health. Of these, one in four is under the age of 35, fuelled by a spike in mental health conditions. Finch links this “concerning” trend to a dramatic rise in what are termed “deaths of despair” – suicide, drug and alcohol abuse – particularly among younger people. From 2019-2021, these deaths made up more than 41 per cent of fatalities in the 25 to 29 age group. Regions with higher rates of unemployment, economic inactivity and solitary living were also hardest hit.
Alongside all this, rates of chronic loneliness have risen by 6 per cent in the UK since the pandemic, with 16- to 24-year-olds identified as one of the most vulnerable groups, according to the Campaign to End Loneliness. Research has shown that the health risks of loneliness are as bad as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than those associated with obesity and physical inactivity.
Combating loneliness is so fundamental to health that Barzilai cites “social connectivity” as one of the four key pillars of longevity that need to be optimised, along with exercise, diet and sleep. “All of them have an underlying biological aging mechanism,” he says.
We need to put public health and prevention of ill health almost on a wartime footing
Dr Veena Raleigh, The King’s Fund
Alongside taking a tailored, personal approach to these aspects of our health, Barzilai highlights the effectiveness of four types of drug that can reduce the likelihood of developing age-related diseases: Metformin (used to treat type 2 diabetes); SGLT2 inhibitors (used to treat type 2 diabetes, heart failure and kidney disease); GLP-1 agonists (the umbrella term for medications such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity); and bisphosphonates (used to treat osteoporosis).
Drugs like these give hope that we can keep on enhancing life expectancy. But in the UK, widespread public health measures must be implemented by the government, say the experts, if we’re to make real progress. Smoking is the perfect example of how legislation can have a pronounced effect on health and lifespan. From 1993 onwards, major tax hikes on cigarettes saw sales plummet. Combined with the smoking ban, introduced in the Noughties, this resulted in a major decline in smoking and, consequently, deaths: the lung cancer mortality rate fell by 53.2 per cent in men and 20.7 per cent in women between 1993 and 2018.
The new scourges on health? Obesity, sedentary lifestyles and harmful alcohol consumption. There’s much more scope for using fiscal and regulatory measures to reduce obesity by targeting unhealthy foods, rather than placing the burden of responsibility on the individual, posits Raleigh. Tackling the location of fast food joints – ensuring they’re not operating next to schools and in deprived areas, for example – and introducing measures to reduce the fat, salt and sugar content of processed foods, could prove successful. “Population-level measures have a greater impact than depending on individual behaviour changes, because those messages are usually taken up by more affluent people,” she says. “They are the ones who will go and exercise more, who will modify their diet.”
Finch agrees that “population level intervention” is needed, recommending steps including restricting advertising of unhealthy foods and incentivising the reformulation of products by brands to make them healthier via taxation (the sugar tax has already shown some promising results on this front).
In the government’s recently released 10 Year Health Plan, which sets out how it intends to transform the NHS, it says the overall goal is “to halve the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions, while increasing it for everyone”. Obesity will be tackled by restricting junk food advertising targeted at children and banning the sale of high-caffeine energy drinks to those under 16.
Does it go far enough? Sadly not. “Given the parlous state of population health, I think we need to put public health and prevention of ill health almost on a wartime footing,” says Raleigh. “I think we need to be much bolder on prevention than we are.”
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