Health Expectancy Indicators in Older Adult Men and Women in European Countries: Findings from the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)

Wiktoria Wroblewska , SGH Warsaw School of Economics

The objective of this paper is to provide a broader assessment of the health of older people in 12 European countries using measures of health expectancies covering various health domains. Based on data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE Wave 7) five health expectancy indicators were estimated: life expectancy in good self-perceived health, life expectancy without chronic morbidity or with one chronic morbidity, life expectancy without global activity limitation, life expectancy without ADL limitation, and life expectancy without IADL limitation. We examine people aged 60 – the age at which morbidity and functional limitations begin to rapidly increase. The health expectancy indicators in our analysis cover various domains of older-adult health and better capture its multidimensionality, and collectively largely cover many aspects of worsening health status and the disablement process. The multivariate nature of the health status measurement prompted us to also use a multivariate comparative analysis and to determine a synthetic measure of health status. The results showed large disproportions in health expectancy indicators in the later years of life of men and women in the European countries analysed, and these differences are greater than those relating to life expectancy. Our analyses confirmed greater differences between countries for the level of health expectancies than for life expectancy at age 60, and countries of Central and Eastern Europe can expect significantly fewer years of life without health restrictions than other more affluent countries.

See paper

 Presented in Session 49. Health and Quality of Life of Older People