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Review of Longevity Trends in the United Kingdom to 2025 and Beyond

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Notes

  1. Premature mortality among males (<65) declined from 24.4% in 1984-6 to 16% in 2004-6; and among females from 14.9% to 11.1% over the same period.

  2. Over the last 20 years the chances of a 65 year-old women reaching the age of 80 have improved from 61% to 71%. Although the odds for a 65 year old man are not so good, they are still better than evens (59%), and much better than they were 20 years ago (41%).

  3. This is not true for all developing world. Some countries, such as the USA and Netherlands, have experienced relative stagnation in mortality improvement, especially among women (Mesle & Vallin).

  4. In 1981, the gap in life expectancy at birth was 6 years. In 2006 it was 4.3 years, which is relatively low for a rich country at the beginning of the 21st century.

  5. The relative gap in death rates between upper and lower socio-economic groups has grown more in northern Europe (inc. the Nordic countries) than in the south.

  6. Although analysis of mortality by ‘underlying cause’ suggests that stroke mortality in the UK has been declining more slowly than CHD mortality in recent years—indicative perhaps of a slowdown in the well-recognised long-term secular decline in stroke mortality—Goldacre et al. (2008) have argued that a revision of these estimates may be in order (at least for the UK), since mortality based on underlying cause alone misses about one-quarter of all stroke-related deaths.

  7. Combined life expectancy at birth would reach 100 years before the end of the century.

  8. Though we should not underestimate the difficulties and disagreements involved in determining what the ‘present’ trajectory is.

  9. This is not to say that the data on recent trends might not indicate that there has in fact been a compression of disability over, say, the last 20 years; and this trend may provide the basis for a ‘best-bet’ projection for the future.

  10. When this argument was first developed, dementia was classified as a non-fatal degenerative disease. It now appears as a cause of death on death certificates. Although this change weakens the force of the distinction between fatal and non-fatal degenerative disease, the essential point remains the same.

  11. This compares with the estimate of 6–7 years of life lost at age 40 for obese non-smokers in the Framingham cohort (Peeters et al. 2003)

  12. Olshansky et al. (1990) estimated that the elimination of mortality from cancer would add 3.2 years to life expectancy at birth in the USA.

  13. Though presumably it might take quite some time to have this kind of population-wide effect.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Kenneth Howse

  2. Oxford Institute of Ageing, 66 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PR, UK

    Sarah Harper

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  1. Kenneth Howse
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  2. Sarah Harper
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Correspondence to Sarah Harper.

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Howse, K., Harper, S. Review of Longevity Trends in the United Kingdom to 2025 and Beyond. Population Ageing 1, 225–240 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12062-009-9014-4

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