The popular belief is that Japan and other Nordic countries have the highest life expectancy. And for the most part, that’s true.
In 2018, the average life expectancy in Japan was 84.2 years, according to the World Health Organization. While the men live an average of 81.1 years, the women could live up to 87.1 years.
But, according to researcher Dr. Collin Payne of the Australian National University, the current methods of calculating how long a group of people can live is flawed.
“Most measures of life expectancy are just based on mortality rates at a given time,” Dr. Payne said. ” It’s basically saying if you took a hypothetical group of people and put them through the mortality rates that a country experienced in 2018, for example, they would live to an average age of 80.”
The researcher further explained that the current methods don’t take the life courses – how they lived through to old age – into account.
So, he invented a novel way of measuring life expectancy, which accounts for the historical mortality of conditions that today’s generations lived through. It’s called the Lagged Cohort Life Expectancy (LCLE) approach.
By this measure, Australian men live to 74.1 years, longer than any other group of males in the world. The researcher also ranked the Australian women second, behind the Swiss women.
In a statement, researcher and co-author of the study, Dr. Payne said:
“The results have a lot to do with long term stability and the fact Australia’s had a high standard of living for a really, really long time. Simple things like having enough to eat, and not seeing a lot of major conflicts play a part.”
How the LCLE Approach Works
Dr. Payne’s paper published in the journal Population explained how the LCLE measure works.
To create a new approach, Dr. Payne grouped people by their year of birth. After separating the “early deaths” from the late ones, the researcher came up with the age at which a person can be considered an above-average survivor.
The LCLE measure compares a group of people from the same year. That way, people who had similar life experiences would belong in the same category. This tells us if someone is reaching their cohort’s life expectancy.
“For example, an Australian man who’s above age 74 we know with 100 percent certainty has outlived half of his cohort — he’s an above-average survivor compared to his peers born in the same year,” Dr. Payne said. “On the other hand, any man who’s died before age 74 is not living up to their cohort’s life expectancy.”
The researcher intends to collect enough data to analyze how life expectancy rankings have changed across the world in the last 30 or 40 years.
Comments (0)
Most Recent