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Best-practice healthy life expectancy vs life expectancy: catching up or lagging behind?

Iñaki Permanyer, Centre for Demographic Studies
Sergi Trias-Llimós, Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics
Jeroen Spijker, Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics (CED)

Best-practice life expectancy has been shown to steadily increase since 1840. A topic of increasing interest is whether or not the raising years of life that are gained in low-mortality settings are spent in good or bad health. We aim to contribute to the compression versus expansion of morbidity debate by examining time trends in best-practice in healthy life expectancy (HALE) over the last 3 decades and compare them with best-practice life expectancy (LE) using data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. Best-practice female LE is increasing 0.19 years per year in 1990-2019, which is slower than what previously estimated using longer time trends (1840-2017, slope=0.24). Best-practice female HALE is increasing at slower speed (slope=0.15) as compared with LE. Best-practice male LE and HALE were lower compared with women, but HALE was also increasing at slower pace. Years spent with disability are increasing, and the proportion of years lived with disability seems to be increasing as well. This work will be extended by including estimates at different age groups and by exploring the robustness of the results using other estimates or data sources for estimating HALE. The implications of these findings on morbidity dynamics will be discussed.

Keywords: Health and morbidity, Longevity, Mortality

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session 84. Longevity in Perspective