The Prevalence of Chronic Diseases During Mortality Increase: Hungary in the 1980s

Abstract

Morbidity has increased during recent decades in Japan, the United States, and Britain, while mortality has declined. These patterns suggest that mortality decline may influence population composition in ways that contribute to higher sickness rates. In Hungary, mortality has increased since the mid-1960s. This experience, and results from the Hungarian health surveys of 1981 and 1986, make it possible to examine an inverse version of the hypothesis that sickness rates increase when death rates decline. Overall, and in most specific adult age groups, the prevalence of chronic disease in Hungary decreased. Hungarian experience in the 1980s suggests that population composition changed through the withdrawal of ‘non-survivors’, individuals who lived shorter lives under the 1986 mortality regime than they would have lived under that of 1981.