Global Patterns of Healthy Life Expectancy

Background: Healthy life expectancy – sometimes called health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE) – is a form of health expectancy indicator that extends measures of life expectancy to account for the distribution of health states in the population. The World Health Organization reports on healthy life expectancy for 192 WHO Member States. This paper describes variation in average levels of population health across these countries and by sex for the year 2002. Methods: Mortality was analysed for 192 countries and disability from 135 causes assessed for 17 regions of the world. Health surveys in 61 countries were analyzed using new methods to improve the comparability of self-report data. Results: Healthy life expectancy at birth ranged from 40 years for males in Africa to over 70 years for females in developed countries in 2002. The equivalent "lost" healthy years ranged from 15% of total life expectancy at birth in Africa to 8–9% in developed countries. Conclusion: People living in poor countries not only face lower life expectancies than those in richer countries but also live a higher proportion of their lives in poor health. Background In the World Health Report 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported for the first time on the average levels of population health for its 191 member countries using a summary measure that combines information on mortality and morbidity [1,2]. Because substantial resources are devoted to reducing the incidence of conditions that cause ill-health but not death and to reducing their impact on people's lives, it is important to capture both fatal and non-fatal health outcomes in any such measure of population health. Healthy life expectancy – sometimes called health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE) – is a form of health expectancy indicator that extends measures of life expectancy to represent the average health in a population in terms of equivalent years of full health, taking into account the distribution of health states [3]. HALE has been calculated previously for Canada and Australia using population survey data on disability [4-6]. The United States has adopted a public health policy goal to Published: 24 December 2004 BMC Public Health 2004, 4:66 doi:10.1186/1471-2458-4-66 Received: 13 July 2004 Accepted: 24 December 2004 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/4/66 © 2004 Mathers et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.