Estimating the Healthy Life Expectancy from the Health State Function of a Population in Connection to the Life Expectancy at Birth

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flexible method to estimate Healthy Life Expectancy using the health state function, applicable across different time periods without disease-specific data, and compares well with WHO estimates.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel, data-efficient approach to estimate healthy life years based on the health state function, avoiding reliance on disease data collection.

Findings

The method aligns well with WHO estimates for 2000.

It is adaptable to various time periods and data availability.

The approach is implemented in Excel for practical use.

Abstract

Following our previous works on the health state of a population and the related health state function we proceed in developing a method to estimate the Healthy Life Expectancy in connection to the relative impact of the Mortality Area in the health state function graph. The resulting tools are applied to the data sets for 1990, 2000 and 2009 for the Countries of the World Health Organization (WHO). The application is done in the Excel Chart and it is ready to be used for other time periods. The results are compared with the estimates presented in the WHO report for 2000 showing a good relationship between the estimates of the two methods. However, our proposed method, not based on collection of data for diseases and other causes affecting a healthy life, is more flexible. We can estimate the healthy life years from various time periods when information related to diseases is missing. Keywords: Health state function, Healthy life expectancy, Deterioration, Loss of healthy years, HALE, DALE, World Health Organization, WHO