Healthy life expectancy
Ageing and Chronic Care
Definition. Healthy life expectancy is the average number of years a person can expect to live in good health, combining mortality and morbidity or disability data into one indicator.
Explanation
Sullivan proposed the method that combines life tables with prevalence of ill health, which remains the most common way of calculating health expectancies (Sullivan, 1971). Healthy life expectancy is central to the debate on whether longer lives mean more years in good health or more years with disease and disability.
Related concepts
Compression of morbidity Disability-adjusted life year (DALY) Multimorbidity Frailty
References
Sullivan, D. F. (1971). A single index of mortality and morbidity. HSMHA Health Reports, 86(4), 347–354.
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Healthy life expectancy. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/healthy-life-expectancy/
Articles that discuss this concept
2 articles on The Health Topics mention this concept. Most relevant first.