PAPP101 - S08: Life Tables (II)

Healthy life expectancy

In the last sentence of the section on life expectancy we asked whether, when life expectancy gains mostly affect older people, are these older people living longer in good health or not?

Two opposing scenarios present themselves - older people may be living longer but spending much of that additional time with disabling conditions. Alternatively they may be living longer lives in a healthy state with only a brief period of disability prior to death. The scenarios are known as extension of morbidity or compression of morbidity respectively.

One only has to read the constant press articles about Alzheimer's disease, obesity, cancer to worry that the first scenario may be true but many older people are also noticeably more active than in previous decades. Very likely the real picture lies somewhere in the middle but how do we find out?

We can use the life table in a particular way to investigate this problem. This is an interesting application that focuses on the _nL_xcolumn and one can consider it both as a column of person-years and as a column describing a population structure - conceptually it works both ways.