The transition in health in a population aged 65 years and over in Europe

Abstract

Analysis of changes in the health of older people is an important issue for social policy and health protection. In the paper, we present changes in morbidity for different cohorts (aged 65+) for selected 31 European countries. Life expectancy and health-adjusted life expectancy are used in order to study the stages of health transition: the relative compression, relative expansion, and relative dynamic equilibrium. Using an approach called a new general theory of population ageing [Michel, J., and J. Robine. 2004. “A “New” General Theory of Population Ageing.” Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance—Issues and Practice 29 (4):667–78.], we observe that for some cohorts of elderly the number of years lived with disability rised again in 2016 compared to 1990.

Keywords:

• HALE
• morbidity
• health transition

Notes

1 Two important limitations of this algorithm are: (1) it uses contiguity constraints in a static way, where the contiguity matrix is not dynamically updated during the clustering process and (2) minimum spanning tree has a well-known “chaining” problem that results in sub-optimal regions.

2 The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite statistic (composite index) of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators.

3 A restriction to the procedure was added by establishing a minimum number of units in each cluster (minimum three countries). For each island—Iceland, Malta, and Cyprus the nearest neighbour was found. All calculations were made in R environment (with spdep library).

4 More than four clusters do not add a significant gain to the homogeneity of clusters.