A lot of researchers studying lifespan believe that there is (at some level) a tradeoff between aging and risk of cancer. The idea is that if you live long enough, you are more or less guaranteed to come down with one sort of cancer or another - there have been so many cell divisions along the way that some of them may well have gone wrong in some way, and so much cellular environmental wear and tear laid in on top of those. Now, it has to be said that not all of these cancerous events will directly lead to mortality; the connection is not so simple. For instance, it’s believed that a number of elderly men die with some sort of slow-moving prostate cancer, but do not die of it (and may not have ever known that anything like that was happening). In such cases, some sort of cardiovascular trouble is more likely to be the proximate cause of death.
But what if we were to find a way to extend the average human lifespan to 120, 150, 200 years?
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/longer-life-cost
Related: