According to a new method of calculating life expectancy, Australian men and Swiss women would come first on a global scale.
In metropolitan France, in 2018 according to INSEElife expectancy reached 79.5 years for men and 85.4 years for women. However, according to a new study, the method used to arrive at these results is not significant. The researchers therefore developed a new technique, taking into account mortality at each generation, to calculate life expectancy in 15 countries. According to their results, which lead to a much lower average, Australian men and Swiss women are the champions of longevity. This study was published on August 17 in the journal Population Studies.
“Today, life expectancy of a person is based on the average life expectancy at each age for a given year, a little as if this person remained “frozen” on this single year. But that doesn’t tell us anything about his background or his life experience.”, explains Michel Guillot, research director at INED and co-author of the article in the preamble. “Most measures of life expectancy are based solely on mortality rates at any given time,” adds Dr Collin Payne, from the Australian National University (ANU) School of demography, who also wrote the item. “It’s basically saying that if you took a hypothetical group of people and subjected them to the death rates that a country was experiencing in, say, 2018, they would live to an average age of 80. year”.
This is why they decided to establish a new indicator called “shifted cohort life expectancy”. “Our figure is not based on a theoretical model but on the effective life expectancy of a generation, much closer to reality”, explains Guillaut. Scientists have therefore grouped people by year of birth in order to distinguish “early” from “late” deaths. They were thus able to determine whether a person could be considered an above-average survivor or not.
77 years for women and 68.8 years for men in France
Race results: in France, in 2014, life expectancy peaked at 77 years for women and 68.8 years for men, against 85.4 years and 79.3 years with the classic INSEE method this year. According to the researchers, these poor figures, are explained for the male sex largely by the high mortality during the Second World War and alcoholism.
With this new technique, the Japanese lose 13.8 years for women and 12 years for men. Here, the researchers recall that while life expectancy made a spectacular leap in the land of the Rising Sun in the 1980s, before it was very low. “For example, we will observe a good life expectancy among 80-year-old Japanese men, but it is because they are the ones who survived the health difficulties of the 1930s, so they are the most “solid”, but that does not take not take into account all those of this generation who died before”comments Michel Guillot.
As for the big winner of this study, it is Australia. This country leads the pack for men (74.1 years) and second after Switzerland for women (79 years against 78.9 years). Unsurprisingly, the inhabitants of the Nordic countries (Sweden and Norway), regularly shown as an example for their healthy lifestyle, are then those who live the longest (78.6 years for women and 73.1 years for men in Norway and 78.4 years for women and 74 years for men in Sweden).
In the United States, life expectancy is stagnating
“Australia and the Nordic countries have a fairly homogeneous population and have long enjoyed a fairly good quality of life”, comments Michel Guillot. By way of comparison, “Mortality was very high in Japan in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. In Australia, mortality was very low at that time,” recalls Dr. Payne.
Based on historical data, the numbers in the new study say little about the future. For example, it is not known whether the catch-up effect observed in Japan and France will continue. “In the United States, for example, which has long been well ranked, we see that life expectancy tends to stagnate or even decline., notes Michel Guillot. Thus, the average life expectancy of Americans may decrease in future rankings.
For a better understanding of these trends, the researchers hope to eventually collect enough data to analyze how the rankings have evolved country by country over the past thirty or forty years.
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