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 populat...

BACKGROUND During the previous century the average lifespan in the United States (US) increased by over 30 years, with much of this increase attributed to public health initiatives. This report examines further gains that might be achieved through reduced occurrence of injury-related death. METHODS US life tables and injury death rate data were used to estimate potential increases in life exp...

BACKGROUND To plan for pensions and health and social services, future mortality and life expectancy need to be forecast. Consistent forecasts for all subnational units within a country are very rare. Our aim was to forecast mortality and life expectancy for England and Wales' districts. METHODS We developed Bayesian spatiotemporal models for forecasting of age-specific mortality and life exp...

BACKGROUND Although mortality and health inequalities at birth have increased both geographically and in socioeconomic terms, little is known about inequalities at age 85, the fastest growing sector of the population in Great Britain (GB). AIM To determine whether trends and drivers of inequalities in life expectancy (LE) and disability-free life expectancy (DFLE) at age 85 between 1991 and 2...

BACKGROUND The analysis describes trends in the levels and social distribution of total life expectancy and healthy life expectancy in South Australia from 1999 to 2008. METHODS South Australian Burden of Disease series for the period 1999-2001 to 2006-2008 and across statistical local areas according to relative socioeconomic disadvantage were analyzed for changes in total life expectancy an...

The concept of human development has recently emerged to rival economic development as a worldwide objective of public policy. In assessing human welfare, advocates of this concept would, at a minimum, place indicators of social conditions, notably life expectancy and educational achievement, on equal footing with traditional economic measures like GDP per capita and a poverty index; some would...

OBJECTIVE We sought to investigate to what extent worldwide improvements in mortality over the past 50 years have been accompanied by convergence in the mortality experience of the world's population. METHODS We have adopted a novel approach to the objective measurement of global mortality convergence. The global mortality distribution at a point in time is quantified using a dispersion measu...