[extropy-chat] life expectancy

[BillK]

On Sun Nov 30, 2003 03:38 pm Damien Broderick queried:
>
> Bill, I'm still trying to make sense of this. After you exclude the
> wild and dangerous life style of Canadian women, their life 
> expectancy *drops* from 81.4 years to 73.5? I guess that the latter
> figure is for the entire living female population, or more exactly
> that the former figure is for girl babies born between 1997 and 1999, does 
> that sound right?
>

Yeh, confusing isn't it? :)
Even when you read it in the full report it still seems likely to confuse.

First, they say:
"Life expectancy at birth is currently approximately 81.4 and 75.9 years
for Canadian women and men respectively. When all external preventable
causes were excluded, the sex gap in life expectancy was greatly
reduced, at an estimated 84.9 and 82.7 years for women and men
respectively, indicating that women do not appear to have a large
biological survival advantage, but, rather, are at lower risk of
preventable deaths".

i.e. an increase of 6.8 years for men. These are the numbers the
reporter should have quoted for the general public.

But the reporter chose to quote from a later paragraph.
"Health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE) at birth was 70.0 and 66.7 years
for men and women (1997-1999). When preventable causes were excluded,
HALE actually became slightly lower for women (73.5 years) as compared
with men (73.9 years).

Health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE) is a particular type of health
expectancy measure. It incorporates explicit weights to combine discrete
health states into a single indicator of the expectation of equivalent
years of good health.
i.e. it is not TOTAL lifespan, but only expected years in good health.

Clear as mud, now? ;)


But the point is even truer now. If men could learn to behave
themselves, they would live 6.8 years longer.

I'll stick to playing tiddlywinks, that's exciting enough for me.

BillK