The Health Status of a Population estimated: The History of Health State Curves

TL;DR

This paper reviews the historical development and recent advancements in modeling the health status of populations using stochastic methods, focusing on health state curves and their applications in demographic analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to calculating health state curves based on the stochastic theory of first exit time, enhancing understanding of population health dynamics.

Findings

Health state curves can be fitted to data or generated via stochastic simulations.

The method estimates health state, life expectancy, and age at mean zero health state.

The approach improves analysis of healthy life expectancy and maximum lifespan.

Abstract

Following the recent publication of our book on Exploring the Health State of a Population by Dynamic Modeling Methods in The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis (DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65142-2) we provide this brief presentation of the main findings and improvements regarding the Health State of a Population. (See at: http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319651415). Here the brief history of the Health State or Health Status curves for individuals and populations is presented including the main references and important figures along with an illustrated Poster (see Figure 13 and http://www.smtda.net/demographics2018.html). Although the Survival Curve is known as long as the life tables have introduced, the Health State Curve was calculated after the introduction of the advanced stochastic theory of the first exit time. The health state curve is illustrated in several graphs either as a fit curve to data or produced after a large number of stochastic realizations. The Health State, the Life Expectancy and the age at mean zero health state are also estimated. Keywords: Health State and Survival Curves, Health status of a population, First exit time stochastic theory, stochastic simulations of health state, Age at Maximum Curvature, Healthy Life Expectancy and HALE, Standard Deviation, Health State Curves, Maximum human lifespan and other.