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Dynamics of life expectancy and life span equality
- Source :
- Aburto, J M, Villavicencio, F, Basellini, U, Kjærgaard, S & Vaupel, J W 2020, ' Dynamics of life expectancy and life span equality ', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 117, no. 10, pp. 5250-5259 . https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1915884117, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, National Academy of Sciences, 2020, pp.1-10. ⟨10.1073/pnas.1915884117⟩, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publication Year :
- 2020
-
Abstract
- Significance Why life expectancy and life span equality have increased together is a question of scientific interest. Both measures are calculated for a calendar year and might not describe a cohort’s actual life course. Nonetheless, life expectancy provides a useful measure of average life spans, and life span equality gives insights into uncertainty about age at death. We show how patterns of change in life expectancy and life span equality are described by trajectories of mortality improvements over age and time. The strength of the relationship between life expectancy and life span equality is not coincidental but rather a result of progress in saving lives at specific ages: the more lives saved at the youngest ages, the stronger the relationship is.<br />As people live longer, ages at death are becoming more similar. This dual advance over the last two centuries, a central aim of public health policies, is a major achievement of modern civilization. Some recent exceptions to the joint rise of life expectancy and life span equality, however, make it difficult to determine the underlying causes of this relationship. Here, we develop a unifying framework to study life expectancy and life span equality over time, relying on concepts about the pace and shape of aging. We study the dynamic relationship between life expectancy and life span equality with reliable data from the Human Mortality Database for 49 countries and regions with emphasis on the long time series from Sweden. Our results demonstrate that both changes in life expectancy and life span equality are weighted totals of rates of progress in reducing mortality. This finding holds for three different measures of the variability of life spans. The weights evolve over time and indicate the ages at which reductions in mortality increase life expectancy and life span equality: the more progress at the youngest ages, the tighter the relationship. The link between life expectancy and life span equality is especially strong when life expectancy is less than 70 y. In recent decades, life expectancy and life span equality have occasionally moved in opposite directions due to larger improvements in mortality at older ages or a slowdown in declines in midlife mortality. Saving lives at ages below life expectancy is the key to increasing both life expectancy and life span equality.
- Subjects :
- Male
medicine.medical_specialty
demography
Aging
Databases, Factual
Longevity
Population Dynamics
AGEING
Social Sciences
LIFE_SPAN
pace and shape
[SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Life Expectancy
Sex Factors
Pace and shape
medicine
Humans
030212 general & internal medicine
Mortality
030304 developmental biology
Pace
Demography
Life span variation
Sweden
0303 health sciences
Multidisciplinary
Life span
Public health
aging
Age Factors
life span variation
mortality
3. Good health
Life expectancy
Female
Public Health
Psychology
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00278424 and 10916490
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Aburto, J M, Villavicencio, F, Basellini, U, Kjærgaard, S & Vaupel, J W 2020, ' Dynamics of life expectancy and life span equality ', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 117, no. 10, pp. 5250-5259 . https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1915884117, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, National Academy of Sciences, 2020, pp.1-10. ⟨10.1073/pnas.1915884117⟩, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....4d5e82f396f018a3f6776d7ef0f322d0