Healthy life expectancy among Indians and Canadians: Are there any differences by gender, rurality, and socioeconomic status

Abstract

The concept of life expectancy was introduced in the 1960s and developed by Sullivan in 1970s. Recently, there has been great interest in the estimation of health expectancy between both policy makers and members of the research community. This interest arises from the fact that measures of health expectancies potentially offer easily comprehensible indicators of both the level of, and change in, physical and or mental well being among a population. Because these measures incorporate indicators of both mortality and morbidity, they seem highly appropriate as summary measures of the effects of changing health status and mortality schedules in populations where mortality decline is dominated by declining death rates due to chronic diseases among the older populations. With the World Health Survey data, we will examine the factors affecting healthy longevity by computing healthy life expectancy by gender, rurality, and socioeconomic status. Specifically, we will calculate life expectancies and health expectancies by using Sullivan methods, and have a comparison between developed and developing regions. We will also present methodological issues in computing active life expectancy based on multistate life table methods. 

Research Team