Healthspan
Public Health & Health Promotion
Definition. Healthspan is the part of life lived in good health, free of serious chronic disease and disability, as distinct from lifespan, the total number of years lived.
Explanation
The term became central with the rise of ageing research, where extending healthspan, and not only lifespan, is the stated goal. Kaeberlein (2018) questions how healthy the concept itself is, arguing that it is loosely defined and hard to measure, so that a study using it must state what it counts as healthy, for example the absence of diagnosed disease or preserved physical and cognitive function. At population level, healthspan is usually approximated by health expectancy indicators such as healthy life expectancy.
Crimmins (2015) shows that the gains in life expectancy of the past century have not been matched by a later onset of most health problems, so that increasing the relative healthspan would require delaying the physiological changes that lead to disease and disability. The gap between lifespan and healthspan is also used as a policy target, and its size differs between countries and between women and men, as the compression of morbidity article shows for Türkiye.
Related concepts
Healthy life expectancy Compression of morbidity Frailty Multimorbidity
Read on The Health Topics
- Healthy Longevity: An Introduction (101)
- Living Longer, but Healthier? Compression of Morbidity and the Case of Türkiye
References
Crimmins, E. M. (2015). Lifespan and healthspan: Past, present, and promise. The Gerontologist, 55(6), 901–911. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnv130
Kaeberlein, M. (2018). How healthy is the healthspan concept? GeroScience, 40(4), 361–364. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-018-0036-9
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Healthspan. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/healthspan/
Articles that discuss this concept
1 article on The Health Topics mention this concept. Most relevant first.