Health Expectancy vs Life Expectancy

People are giving more preference to having more active & healthy years in their life (Healthspan).?

The concept of health expectancy was introduced in the 1960s by Sanders and Sullivan. This was because life expectancy no longer served its original purpose in developed countries. Life expectancy has been used as an indicator of population health for a long time. It is a summary measure of mortality at all ages adjusted for population age structure.?

One of the Director-General of WHO stated in the mid-1990s, “Increased longevity without quality of life is an empty prize. Health expectancy is more important than life expectancy.”

Life Expectancy Vs. Health Expectancy

Life expectancy has for long been seen as the measure of our state of health. Many people assume that Life expectancy is an age at which people are actually living but it is a hypothetical measure (It assumes that the age-specific death rates for the year will be applicable throughout the lifetime).

Due to the incredible advances of Western medicine, we’re likely to continue living longer and longer. We are so fortunate to live in a time where there is such extraordinary emergency medicine available to us.

According to WHO, the average life expectancy is 73 years, which has been steadily increasing. One can attribute this to factors like - the increase in access to medical care facilities, significant advances in emergency medicine, access to food, and a better ability to tackle natural calamities.

What Is Causing Lower Health Expectancy?

In the last 100 years infectious diseases, which were the main cause of death among populations, became less threatening, and the proportion of people with chronic and degenerative diseases was increasing, life expectancy was not as tightly tied to health.?

2001 was the significant year of change of trend when lifestyle diseases overtook infectious diseases globally as the major cause of death. Even multiple studies of COVID data has shown people with comorbidities had significantly higher death rate and also had long-term effects.??

Thus, in order to assess and monitor the state of population health, researchers, as well as policymakers, were searching for a population health indicator that would combine both mortality and morbidity.

Life expectancy (LE) is a statistical measure of the average time an organism is expected to live, based on the year of its birth, its current age, and other demographic factors like sex. The most commonly used measure is life expectancy at birth (source Wikipedia)

WHO defines Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE) as the Average number of years that a person can expect to live in "full health" by taking into account years lived in less than full health due to disease and/or injury. The average HALE is 63 years.

Here you can see the table

Source: WHO 2019 data

There’s a staggering gap of an average of 10 years between average HALE & LE. Although not a perfect comparison of two stat points it does indicate that on average people are spending 10 years of their life in incomplete health.?

Yet, in reality, are we living too short and dying too long?

One important point to remember is our health is never static it is progression and regression usually keeps moving.

Source: NCBI

The consequences of increasing the number of healthy life years not only raise the quality of life but can be advantageous in the economic world because

1. Lower health expenditure and burden on healthcare infrastructure
2. Increased possibility of people working for longer period of time
3. Higher total consumption over the lifetime

In fact, the EU has targeted a stat called Healthy life years as one of the health policy goals. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_Life_Years)

Times when healthcare costs are increasing exponentially it is high time that in India too we should target as part of policy what do you think?

Do you think reducing the gap should be part of policy make objective while planning health investment a key metric please share your views in the comments

Reference:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178833/#:~:text=Health%20expectancy%20is%20the%20analysis,over%20the%20entire%2086%20years.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7314621/