Healthy life expectancy (HLE) is the expected number of remaining years of life in good health starting at a given age, usually at birth or at sixty-five years of age, assuming current mortality and morbidity rates. In the United States, the average life expectancy is 84.1 years and the average HALE is 78.9 years. As a result, the difference in life expectancy between adequate and inadequate access to health care was reduced. After adjusting for multiple confounding factors, the increase in life expectancy dropped to approximately 1 to 1.5 years at age 65 and to 0.6 to 0.8 years at 85. Chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer, are the most common and costly health problems, but they are largely preventable.
HALE takes into account several different data points, such as mortality rates and information on health status, to estimate healthy life expectancy. First, residual life expectancy was estimated as the area under the survival curve of up to 100 years, conditioned on survival between 45 and 100 years (intervals of 1 year); survival curves were predicted for each individual and averaged between individuals. Americans could reduce the life expectancy gap between the United States and other industrialized countries by adopting a healthier lifestyle. Clarifying this uncertainty may have important individual, clinical and public health implications, in view of the rapidly increasing trends in the prevalence of multimorbidity.
We observed a similar association between low-risk lifestyle factors and mortality before age 75 (table I of the data supplement available online only). The large overall sample size, which made it possible to estimate life expectancy by multimorbidity state and sex, is an advantage of this study. We applied a competitive risk regression model for cause-specific mortality by including lifestyle factors such as exposure and other risk factors as unrestricted covariates, allowing the effects of covariates to vary depending on cause-specific mortality. Age and sex differences in the association between access to health care and health outcomes among older Chinese people.
However, increases in life expectancy associated with health care persisted by sex and urban and rural residence, despite multiple covariate adjustments. A notable finding was that increases in life expectancy (in years) associated with adequate access to health care were slightly lower in rural areas than in urban areas. However, it is largely unknown how many years of life can be gained or lost due to differences in access to health care among older adults in China. Not to be confused with life expectancy (the maximum number of years a species can currently live above 120 for humans) or life expectancy (the average lifespan of a population), HALE takes into account years spent in less than full health due to illness or injury.
The effects of the socio-economic conditions of children, adults and the community on the health and mortality of older adults in China.
