health expectancy

[cellio]

I saw a news story today about how US life expectancy is at an all-time high. The article doesn't give enough data to be really useful (it's just the popular press, after all), but I found on reading it that I'm not really interested in life-expectancy figures any more. I'm much more interested in the much-harder-to-compute health expectancy.

In other words, at what age do the statistics say the average person will be last able to live independently with a functioning mind and body? (Yes, of course I recognize that this is hard to characterize precisely.) I don't care if life expectancy goes up to 120 if the last 20 years of it are spent lying in a bed no longer able to recognize anyone. That's where we face our challenges today. Keeping people alive is easy; keeping lives worth living all the way to the end is harder.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

There was an NPR piece which said that the diseases of ageing are apt to hit about 10 years later than they used to, and (a vaguer estimate) if we wanted to start Social Security at the age at which a lot of people pretty much couldn't work any more, it should begin at 73.

Keeping people's lives worth living all the way to the end is probably too hard a goal, depending on what you mean by worth living. Maintaining fairly good health for everyone till a year or two before death would be a hard enough goal.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I would also like to see average life expectancy statistics that do not include "young" deaths, for varying values of "young". A single 20 year old dying can skew four 80 year olds by nearly 10 years...

[sue-n-julia.livejournal.com]

Of course, that depends on the type of work people are doing. If you have people who are doing manual labor all their lives, then they still need to be able to retire at 65. Manual labor takes quite a toll on joints, bones, and muscle.

If you are working in an office or in academia, then, sure, you can work until you drop over. You don't have to be able to meet severe physical demands.

As far as quality of life is concerned, I guess we each have to decide where to draw the line. As far as I'm concerned, that hasn't really changed.

S

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

Also, presenting life expectancy as a single number blurs together a bunch of different questions, like infant mortality, average length of retirement, etc. An average life expectancy of 82 isn't really relevant to a healthy 80-year-old, or even one in average health.

[cellio]

Yup, the definition of "worth living" is going to vary, so that can't be the real yardstick. Pretty much any disclosed definition would be more informative than life-expectancy figures, though.

[cellio]

As far as quality of life is concerned, I guess we each have to decide where to draw the line. As far as I'm concerned, that hasn't really changed.

That hasn't changed, but the length of time that one can spend in states where the question comes up has risen over time as we've gotten better at sustaining people we can't cure. Those people used to die earlier, bringing the definitions of life-expectancy and health-expectancy closer together.

[cellio]

Yes. I don't know if they're even factoring out infant mortality. They do distinguish among some ethnic groups, but that's only part of the question.

Speaking from personal rather than statistical interest, the figures I'm most interested in begin "among people who lived to my current age, ...". Filter out all the early killers that didn't kill me, in other words.

[cellio]

Yes. They need to factor out infant mortality (I don't know if they do) and environmental factors, at the least. Coal workers probably have a lower life-expectancy than cube-dwellers because of all the gunk they inhale, for instance. Sometimes you at least see smokers/non-smokers broken out, but not always even that.

I suppose people who are in this for a living, like the folks who set your life-insurance rates, have all the data. I just wish a little more of it were included in these reports to the general public, because an unexplained single number is meaningless.