Addressing Longevity, Life Expectancy and Health Life Expectancy

Abstract

When JPA first tackled the question of longevity back in 2008, (Harper and Howse 2008) we raised four key questions which we believed frame the current debate: 1. Will increases in both life expectancy and in life extension or longevity continue -that is will there be an increase in average years lived by humans and also maximum years attained by a human being? 2. Will life expectancy increase in line with life extension -that is will we all enjoy the benefits of longevity or will it only be for a few? 3. Will increases in life expectancy be accompanied by increases in life extension or are we seeing a compression of longevity after 100 -that is will the predicted increases in centenarians over the coming century be accompanied by increases in super-centenarians? 4. And will advances in life expectancy be matched by advances in healthy life expectancy? We still believe these to be important and unresolved. In 2009, we considered the evidence that mortality reductions in the oldest-old, over 80 years, showed no sign of slowing down. Indeed, data from Japan, which has the lowest mortality in the world, still shows no sign of a compression of mortality, and thus no indication that we are approaching an upper limit to human longevity in the developed world. This is contrary to the expectations of some analysts in the 1980s, and as a result the modal age at death continues to shift upwards. We highlighted work by Cheung and Robine (2007), who analysed Japanese mortality from 1950 to 2000. This showed that not only had there been a strong and linear increase in the modal age at death over the previous 50 years, but also the standard deviation of ages at death above the mode had stopped decreasing in the mid-1980s for women and in the 1990s for Population Ageing (2015) 8:223–226