Published in:
01-04-2014 | Letter to the Editor
The difference between healthy life expectancy and life expectancy at birth in men is smaller than that in women in populations with high life expectancy
Author:
Tomoyuki Kawada
Published in:
International Journal of Public Health
|
Issue 2/2014
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Excerpt
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines healthy life expectancy as the “average number of years that a person can expect to live in ‘full health’”. I read the paper by Van Oyen et al. (
2013) with interest, because they elucidated gender differences in healthy life expectancy at birth (HLE
b) in European Union (EU) countries by selecting mortality and disability as the contributing factors. They adopted meta-regression analysis as a statistical procedure, and clarified that there was an advantage in men’s HLE
b as life expectancy at birth (LE
b) increased. They relied on the procedure by Jagger et al. (
2008), which was widely accepted in studies on health inequalities in EU countries (Lagiewka
2012; Robine et al.
2013). …