PDF version. Flici: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Background : No official estimates have been published regarding healthy life expectancy in Algeria, and chronic disease-free life expectancy in particular, despite their importance for assessing public health policy effectiveness and predicting social security expenditure.
Aims : To estimate chronic disease-free life expectancy in Algeria and analyse its changes in recent years, and to determine how morbidity has changed according to age, time, and gender, compared with mortality, following expansion of morbidity, compression of morbidity, or morbidityβmortality balance. Results : Although Algerian women live an average 1β2 years longer than men, their chronic disease-free life expectancy is 5 years shorter. The gain in life expectancy between and β was accompanied by a decline in chronic disease-free life expectancy from Conclusion : Algerians in β lived longer but not healthier than in , and the number of unhealthy life years increased compared with life expectancy.
Thus, public health programmes need to be more efficient to increase healthy years faster, or at least at the same pace as life expectancy. Citation: Flici F; Chinoune M. Analysis of recent changes in chronic disease-free life expectancy in Algeria. East Mediterr Health J. EMHJ is an open access journal. Life expectancy is often used to assess population health status 1 and effectiveness of public health programmes 2 ; however, healthy life expectancy may be more appropriate 3.
Extension of life does not necessarily imply an improvement in quality of life 4. The relationship between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy is even more complicated and unclear 5. Therefore, investigating how additional life expectancy is lived, in poor or good health, has attracted much interest 6.
There are 3 main scenarios regarding the comparative changes in healthy life expectancy and life expectancy: compression, expansion, or balance 4,7. Compression of morbidity 8 refers to healthy life expectancy improving faster than life expectancy, resulting in a continual reduction and concentration of the unhealthy years to the end of life. Morbidity expansion 9 refers to an increase in unhealthy years as a proportion of life expectancy, which extends the longevity of people with a chronic disease without postponing the onset age When healthy life expectancy and life expectancy improve at similar paces, there is evidence of a mortalityβmorbidity balance The need for appropriate indicators to assess health status was first raised in the mids 12 , and the first method for estimating healthy life expectancy was proposed by Sullivan in the early s Although healthy life expectancy usually refers to various health measures, it corresponds more to disability-free life expectancy 6,12,13 and the 2 concepts are often used interchangeably 4, Disability can have different meanings, ranging from limitation to carrying out basic daily life activities to dependency The fact that chronic diseases are the main causes of disability 5,16 makes chronic disease-free life expectancy one of the principal indicators of healthy life expectancy.
