Mortality Risk and Life Expectancy

Abstract

Changing the mortality risks we face would change human life expectancy. As a special case, one could imagine adding a fixed increment R to all the age-specific mortality rates from age zero upwards. For this case we seek a constant K(A) such that K(A) x R approximates the resulting change in life expectancy remaining at age A, at least for small values of R. The formula for K(A) derived here corrects a heuristic argument that appeared in JORS earlier. An estimate of K(0) suggests that the permanent addition of a one-in-a-million risk at each year of life would reduce life expectancy at birth by about 1 day—a useful fact for risk communication.

Keywords:

• differential approximation
• life expectancy
• life tables
• mortality risk