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Americans Living Longer Than Ever

Oct. 17, 2006 -- Break out the balloons and confetti. The nation's population reached a new milestone Tuesday -- 300 million -- according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

If the idea of living in an increasingly crowded country doesn't put you in a celebratory mood, consider this: The dramatic rise in population over the last century has been accompanied by an even more phenomenal rise in life expectancy.

When the U.S. population reached 100 million in 1915, the average lifespan was 54 years. When we hit 200 million in 1967, it was around 70.

Today, the average lifespan of someone living in the U.S. is just months shy of 78, and there is little reason to think that we won't continue to push the life expectancy envelope.

"Life expectancy worldwide has been rising pretty steadily since 1840, at a rate of about two years per decade," Daniel Perry, who is executive director of the Alliance for Aging Research, tells WebMD. "In 1840, the longest-living people in the world were women in Sweden, and they lived an average of 45 years."

100 and Beyond

Some experts on aging say that within 50 years, the average person living in an industrialized nation with good access to health care will live to be at least 100.

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 diseaseheart disease and cancercancer, 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," he writes.

During the first half of the 20th century revolutionary advances in medicine and public health were responsible for raising the average life expectancy in the U.S. by more than 20 years -- from age 47 in 1900 to age 68 in 1950.

According to the CDC, the 10 greatest medical and public health achievements of the 20th century were:

• Vaccination against disease, resulting in the eradication or elimination of major diseases of the early 20th century, such as smallpox and polio
• Control of infectious disease through improved sanitation, clean water sources, and the introduction of antibiotics
• Improvements in motor-vehicle safety
• Improved workplace safety
• Improved food safety
• Decline in deaths from heart disease and strokestroke
• Smaller families with longer birth intervals due to family planning
• Better prenatal care
• Fluoridation of drinking water
• Public health efforts to reduce smoking

Heart Disease, Smoking

Winifred Rossi is deputy director of the Geriatrics and Clinical Gerontology Program at the National Institute on Aging.

"In 1900 infant mortality, infectious disease, pandemics, and war were the big killers," she tells WebMD. "People tended to die quickly at young ages. The big killers today are chronic diseases of aging like heart disease and cancercancer."