Americans want to live long, but not to past 120-years-old, according to a Pew Research Center survey released on Tuesday.
The report states 69 percent of the 2,012 adults, 18 and older, surveryed say they'd like to live to be between 79 and 100; the median age is 90. According to USA Today, "it is about 11 years longer than the current U.S. average of 78.7 years (81 for women, 76.2 for men)."
The survey was conducted from March 21 to April 8, 2013 and it examines public attitudes about aging, health care, personal life satisfaction, possible medical advances (including radical life extension) and other bioethical issues. It was carried out through phone interviews and researchers reported the following results:
The findings suggest that the U.S. public is not particularly worried about the gradual rise in the number of older Americans. Nearly nine-in-ten adults surveyed say that "having more elderly people in the population" is either a good thing for society (41 percent) or does not make much difference (47 percent). Just 10 percent see this trend as a bad thing.
With advances in medicine, the potential of slow aging and extending life are possible, and people may live to be 120. However, 56 percent of those surveyed would not seek to partake in such treatments, but 38 percent admitted they would consider them.
"There's really so little information about this kind of topic," Cary Funk, a Pew the study's lead author and Pew researcher, told USA Today. "We're talking about something that would slow or repair the aging process and let people live decades longer, beyond the limits of what's thought of as human life expectancy."
Sociologist Karla Erickson of Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, who wasn't involved in the Pew report, told USA Today the divide in those who would seek medical treatment was obvious. She was researching the topic for her book How We Die Now, out next month.
Erickson surveyed about 100 individuals ages 56-102 who lived in an elder community in the Midwest, either living independently or under assisted-living care.
"We have all these choices that previous generations haven't had -- like whether or not to pursue treatment, whether or not to pursue life-extending measures," Erickson told USA Today. "They've witnessed others and they have a lot of ambivalence about whether it's worth it. The people I talked to were really comfortable saying 'I wish my friend had not done it.' Now they believe one should be judicious about what medical procedures to embrace, but they worry when they get to the end, (if) they will go down fighting and pursue every possible life extension."
To view the Pew Research survey findings, click here.
