Trends in Health Expectancies

Abstract

This chapter reviews the emergence of the major theories on change over time in population health status, i.e., compression and expansion of morbidity as well as dynamic equilibrium between morbidity and longevity, proposed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it provides an analysis of health expectancy trends observed since then around the world. The first section focuses on the transition from the conceptual definitions of different scenarios of health status changes over time to the operational definitions measurable in populations on the basis of available mortality data and health data collected through population surveys. The second section describes the different health expectancy trends observed, concentrating mainly on North America, Europe, and Asia, before drawing five general conclusions from these studies.