WIC Hybrid Colloquium

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Marc Luy
Vienna Institute of Demography

Health expectancy: increasingly used, but poorly understood

Wednesday, 26 February 2025

4:00 – 5:00 pm (CET)

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The hybrid seminar will be held in person at

PSK Building, Georg Coch Platz 2, 1010 Vienna, 3rd floor, meeting room 01

and online via Zoom. 

Please register here: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/vid/events/wic-colloquium/wic-colloquium-registration 

Login information for online participation will be sent to all registered participants shortly before the start of the presentation.

Abstract:
Health Expectancy (HE) indicators become increasingly important for health policies and public health measures. The general understanding of HE is that it simply extends the average life expectancy (LE) by one dimension. Technically, this is correct because the years lived by the life table population—the basis of LE—is divided into two quality dimensions: life years spent in good health and those spent in poor health. However, incorporating this additional dimension to the life table makes the HE indicators highly sensitive to various measurement and estimation issues. Their impact on levels and trends in HE can be huge, but is largely ignored in practical application. The talk presents selected examples from the research of the ERC project LETHE that demonstrate the HE sensitivity and discusses the usefulness of the indicator as well as possible ways to reduce its weaknesses.

About the presenter:

Marc Luy is Director of the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Honorary Professor of Demography at the University of Vienna. His research is on trends and differentials in health and mortality. In particular, he wants to better understand the causal mechanisms that enable some (groups of) people to live longer and healthier than others. His best-known research project is the German-Austrian Cloister Study on the health and longevity of Catholic order members. Get more information on his scientific career and research at https://marcluy.eu/ .

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PLEASE SEE https://www.oeaw.ac.at/vid/events/wic-colloquium FOR OUR UPCOMING AND PREVIOUS COLLOQUIA

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