Deriving and Comparing Healthy Longevity Distributions by Gender and Health Prevalence Measures: A Statistical Moments and Maximum Entropy Approach

Rami Cosulich
Vanessa di Lego, Department of Demography, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Virginia Zarulli, University of Padua

Background. The literature on healthy longevity has typically focused on average values (i.e., healthy life expectancy). Despite recent studies starting to shift attention to the whole healthy lifespan distribution, research gaps remain. This study aimed to compare healthy longevity distributions at age 60 between different health measures and sexes. Data and methods. We used data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe merged with the Human Mortality Database. A Markov chain model was used to estimate the first three statistical moments of healthy longevity distributions. The maximum entropy method was then applied to derive the full distributions. The PhiHL statistic and the Hellinger distance were used to compare distributions between males and females. Findings. For most health measures, the probabilities of health loss at younger ages were higher for males than for females, and females had a longer healthy life expectancy. Males had more dispersed distributions with a lower mode. The probability for a man to have a longer healthy lifespan than a female was below 50% for various health measures and was the lowest for living free of cardiovascular disease. In contrast, the probability for a man to live free of arthritis or rheumatism for longer than a female was above 50%. The most similar distributions between males and females were observed with life free of any chronic conditions and life with no more than one chronic condition. Discussion. Further research could investigate healthy longevity distributions by socio-economic status.

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 Presented in Session P5. Health, Mortality, and Ageing 1