Healthy lifespan inequality: Measurement, trends and determinants

Descripción del proyecto

¿Está aumentando la esperanza de vida saludable por igual?

La esperanza de vida media mundial, un cálculo de cuántos años se espera que viva una persona, va al alza. Aumentó cinco años y medio entre 2000 y 2016. Según la Organización Mundial de la Salud, se trató del aumento más rápido desde los años sesenta del siglo pasado. Pero, ¿existe un cálculo de cuánto tiempo vivirá una persona con buena salud? ¿Y de la magnitud de la desigualdad en la esperanza de vida de las personas? La primera pregunta sobre la esperanza de vida saludable es importante en términos de calidad de vida y gastos de atención sanitaria, mientras que la segunda hace referencia a las preocupaciones sobre la equidad y tiene importantes implicaciones éticas. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos HEALIN introduce el concepto de «desigualdad en la esperanza de vida saludable» para investigar hasta qué punto la esperanza de vida saludable se distribuye de forma desigual entre la población. Analizará datos socioeconómicos y sanitarios en busca de tendencias de desigualdad en la esperanza de vida saludable y enfermedades concomitantes.

Objetivo

Despite its widespread use and popularity, life expectancy (LE) has two shortcomings. First, its definition only takes into consideration mortality levels, thus ignoring the health status of those who remain alive. Second, LE is an average that does not explain how length of life is distributed across the population. These limitations have generated two strands of research (i.e. the study of ‘health expectancies’ (HE) and ‘lifespan inequality’ (LI)) that, so far, have developed independently from each other. The overarching objective of the HEALIN project is to bring together these research avenues into a coherent whole to get a more comprehensive understanding of contemporary population health dynamics. To attain this goal, I put forward the new concept of ‘healthy lifespan inequality’ (HLI), which is designed to investigate the extent to which healthy lifespans are unequally distributed across the population.

The HEALIN project will (i) investigate the trends and determinants of HLI, (ii) assess whether the specific ages and causes that drive changes in HLI are the same ones determining the changes in LE, HE and LI indicators, and (iii) investigate how these indicators behave across and within countries and socio-economic groups. In addition, the project aims at making innovative contributions to the measurement of co-morbidity and to our understanding on how the latter can in turn influence the measurement of health expectancy and healthy lifespan inequality. To attain these objectives, the project will develop path-breaking analytical methods inspired in the models applied for the study of inequality and multidimensional poverty. Besides traditional socio-economic and health data sources, the project will complementary draw from the vastly underutilized health registers for the entire population in Catalonia (7.5 million residents). Their huge size and micro-level design allow investigating trends in HLI and co-morbidity with unprecedented detail.