Health expectancy – an introduction

What is health expectancy

Life expectancy can be subdivided into expected lifetime with good health and with poor health. Expected lifetime in a given state of health is referred to as ‘health expectancy’.

As health can be measured in many ways, this health indicator is a common designation for several different indicators that each expresses the health quality of a population’s or population group’s expected lifetime.

Areas of research

For many years, there has been an increase in life expectancy in most countries, and there is a growing interest in analysing if and to what extent increased life expectancy ‘is lost’ as lifetime with poor health. One theory about the relationship between increased life expectancy and expected lifetime with good health is that increased life expectancy will result in more lifetime with chronic disease. The theory is designated as the ‘pandemic of mental disorders, chronic diseases and disabilities’ or the ‘expansion of morbidity hypothesis’.  Another theory is that there is an upper limit to the life expectancy of man, but that a continuous improvement in public health will postpone the time when chronic disease starts to develop – ‘compression of morbidity’. A third theory claims that although the decrease in mortality increases the prevalence of disease, diseases generally will become less serious – ‘dynamic equilibrium’.  In recent years, efforts have been made to examine these theories in a number of studies, but the issue is made complicated by, among others, the fact that there is no unambiguous measure for health status.

Health expectancy can be calculated for various population groups, based for instance on geographical division, division into social groups or into groups with other characteristics.

Life expectancy and expected lifetime without longstanding, limiting illness