For most of the last two centuries, people's lives have been increasing at an accelerated and steady pace.
During the 1840s, people lived on average a little longer than forty years, but after that, in the early 1900s, during the Victorian period, better nutrition, hygiene, living conditions, and the development of the sanitary system influenced the extension of life to sixty years.
As the 20th century progressed, except the war years, further progress was made with the introduction of general health care and vaccination of children writes the BBC.
New progress was made in the 1970s, thanks to health advances in treatment, especially for patients who had suffered a stroke and heart attack.
These major steps were so significant that, by the beginning of the 21st century, life expectancy at birth was 80 for women and 75 for men. The trend continued in a way that demographers added another year of life to residents approximately every four years.
But then that trend suddenly stopped or more precisely, slowed down quite abruptly, and the turning point happened in 2011.
Deviation or a long-term trend?
In the beginning, experts wondered if it was a deviation. Namely, the year 2015 was an exception. The number of deaths rose sharply, especially during the winter when a very strong strain of flu was circulating the world.
But today it is clear that something more than a short-term anomaly has happened there.
According to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics for 2016-2018, the consequences of a severe winter are excluded. And although there has been a slight improvement in the meantime, the numbers are still lower than they were before. Current trends suggest that it will take more than 12 years for UK residents to "get" another year of life.
Achieved "upper limit"?
Some scientists believe that, after so many years of progress, people have simply reached the upper limit of life expectancy.
The oldest living person in the official records was the Frenchwoman Jeanne Kalman, who died at the age of 123, but that was more than 20 years ago.
According to the results of a study published by the scientific journal Nature, the limit of human life expectancy, if we exclude extremes like Jeanne Kalman, is about 115 years.
Others, however, dispute this. One of them is the American geneticist David Sinclair, who wrote the book "Life Expectancy", and in it, he writes that by improving the genes related to longevity, people might be able to live longer than Jeanne Kalman.
Edward Morgan, an expert on aging at the English National Bureau of Statistics, believes that a complex range of factors is more likely to be behind this trend. He says he would like to expand the research.
The English Institute of Public Health has already conducted part of the research. According to one explanation, there have been no major medical or health discoveries in the last few decades.
People, for example, no longer die to such an extent from one disease, but others take their place. With more people surviving heart attacks and strokes and cancer, there has been an increase in deaths as a result of dementia.
And while the medical community is trying to figure out how to slow down the development of this disease, the growth of life expectancy has stopped.
The Public Health Institute of England has also studied the impact of poverty on life expectancy, and former WHO adviser Michael Marmont believes that it plays a certain role.
Now I think that life expectancy, that is, old age, has decreased. There is too much stress these days.