Healthy Longevity Variability: First Insights from the Global Burden of Disease

Virginia Zarulli , University of Padova, Department of Statistics
Hal Caswell, University of Amsterdam

To date, a systematic assessment of the trends in healthy lifespan individual variation is missing, even though how the healthy lifespan is distributed between the individuals within the populations is a fundamental question with demographic, economic, social and public health implications. Similar levels of mean healthy life expectancy in a population or in his subgroups, can be achieved by different distributions of these lifespans between the individuals: one more concentrated and one less concentrated. In this paper we provide the first systematic, international series of trends in the variance of healthy longevity among individuals and test the hypothesis that an inverse relation holds between healthy lifespan length and healthy lifespan variation. To do so we apply a matrix model for health demography that provides any desired statistic of inter-individual variability and use the health prevalence information provided from the Global Burden of Disease Study.

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 Presented in Session 81. Global and Comparative Perspectives on Health and Mortality