International Handbook of Health Expectancies

This handbook presents global research on health expectancies, a measure of population health that examines the interaction between quantity and quality of life. With data from Europe, North America, Asia, and beyond, it explains how to define and measure health and morbidity and how to integrate these measurements with mortality. Coverage first highlights long-term trends in longevity and health. It also considers variations across and within countries, inequalities, and social gaps as well as micro and macro-level determinants. Next, the handbook deals with the methodological aspects of calculating health expectancies. It compares results from different methods and introduces tools, such as decomposition tool for decomposing gaps, an attrition tool for attributing a medical cause to reported disability, and a tool for measuring policy impact on health expectancies. It introduces methods of forecasting health expectancies. The handbook then goes on to examine the synergies and/or trade-off between longevity and health as well as considers such topics as the compression versus the expansion of morbidity/disability and the health-survival paradox. The last section considers new concepts and dimensions of health and, more broadly, well being which can be used in summary measures of population health, including psychological factors. Researchers, clinicians, demographers, and health planners will find this handbook an essential resource to this increasingly important public health and social policy tool. It will help readers gain insight into changes in health over time as well as inequalities between countries, regions, and population subgroups.  

Eileen Crimmins is the AARP Chair in Gerontology, and University Professor at the Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California in Los Angles.  She is a University Professor at USC.  She co-directs the USC/UCLA Center on Biodemography and Population Health, the NIA sponsored Biomarker Network, and the Multidisciplinary Research in Gerontology Training Program at USC.  She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received her PhD in  Demography from The University of Pennsylvania.  Crimmins’ research is in the area of factors promoting healthy aging and healthy life expectancy which examines the interaction of trends in life expectancy and population health.  She has received the Kleemeier award for research from the Gerontological Society of America and the Matilda White Riley Distinguished Scholar Award from the Section on Aging and the Lifecourse of the American Sociological Society. 

Yasuhiko Saito is a Professor at the College of Economics and Population Research Institute at Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan. He obtained his Ph.D. (Sociology) from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA. He has served as a council member of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) from 2005 to 2009 and an executive committee member of the International Social Science Council (ISSC) representing IUSSP from 2010 to 2018.  He has also served as a council member of the Asian Population Association from 2016 to 2018.  His specializations are in demography and gerontology, and he has been working on population aging and health issues in both developed and developing countries.

Renata Yokota is an Epidemiologist and Biostatistician from Brasília, Brazil. She completed her Bachelor in Human Nutrition and her Master of Science in Nutrition Epidemiology at the Universidade de Brasília, Brazil. She was a fellow of the Brazilian Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP/EPISUS) at the Brazilian Ministry of Health in collaboration with the US CDC. She holds a Master degree in Biostatistics and in Methods in Epidemiology and Public Health from Hasselt University, Belgium. She obtained her PhD in Demography from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. She is currently working as a voluntary researcher at the Department of Epidemiology and public health, Sciensano, Belgium and as a consultant in the Department of Management of Noncommunicable Diseases, Disability, Violence and Injury Prevention at the World Health Organization, Switzerland. Her reasearch focuses on disability measurement, surveys methods, non-communicable diseases and health expectancies.

Prof Dr. Herman Van Oyen is Scienfic Director Epidemiology and public health at Sciensano , the Belgian federal research institute of population health and Professor Epidemiology at the Faculty of Medicine (Public Health and Primary Care) and Faculty of Science (Statistics) at University of Ghent . He has been the major driver in the development of the GALI, the Global Activity Limitation Indicator. GALI measures participation restriction and is the disability indicator of the Healthy Life Years. His current research focus on knowledge translation methods related to Health Expectancy, especially the contribution of diseases and life styles to variations in Health Expectancies and more general in the development of a Health Information Impact Index.

Prof Jean-Marie Robine is an Emeritus Research Professor at INSERM, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research and Emeritus Professor at the advanced school Ecole pratique des hautes études in Paris. He studies human longevity, with the aim of understanding the relations between health and longevity. In particular, he measures the impact that the increase in adult life durations may have on the health status of the older population. In his most recent work, he takes into account climate changes.