Are the known chronic diseases related to the human lifespan and its evolution?

There is running debate in the gerontological research literature concerning the relationship between causes of mortality and the human lifespan. Much of this debate concerns whether we can, by biomedical intervention in known degenerative diseases, square the human survivorship curve, at a point near some human "maximum lifespan potential" (MLP) This paper examines the concepts of lifespan and MLP and the relationship between the shape of the survivorship curve and the pattern of age-specific mortality from chronic disease. The MLP need only be viewed as a statistical phenomenon whose genetic determination relates to general human metabolism rather than to programmed events occurring at the end of the human lifespan. The available evidence suggests that slowing of underlying senescence processes will not have the desired effects on survivorship, but rather the opposite.