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...

[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.