RT @statto
Why do we still use ‘over 65’ as the boundary for ‘old’?
In 1950, the left-hand end of this chart, a 60-year-old could expect to live until ~77. Today, that number is 84. People are living healthier for longer today, but we don’t seem to adjust for this ‘longevity inflation’. https://twitter.com/EPBResearch/status/1605321494682386433
@statto Bringing up this issue didn't go well for Macron, so I suspect we are not in for major changes any time soon.
@statto Interesting and important thread. However, isn't the rate of lifespan increase higher than the rate of healthspan increase? This would mean than the fraction of the population suffering from age-related conditions would still be rising. [I don't have the numbers to hand to support this, but I thought this was the case]
@rupertoverall It’s actually quite hard to say! Healthy life expectancy is a slipperier concept than alive/dead and datasets are much shorter-term…but it’s not clear to me that there’s a huge discrepancy: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IL-iRgstODoWa6zjB3dl4Ddm22CQPJM5thOLjfcwVDg/edit#gid=1579648520
And this is also what you’d expect theoretically, because it’s being ill that kills us!
@statto And I guess we would want to know this information at the individual level. Are the people living to an old age those who developed 'life-limiting' illnesses later (presumably there is a very strong relationship between those values!)
It should be possible to dig some relevant data out of long-running cohort studies - I will look around.
@rupertoverall I think the answer is broadly yes—the classic example is centenarians, who seem to age in a broadly similar way to the rest of us but 20 years later! IIRC the average person who makes it past 100 lives independently until they’re 100, which is pretty impressive…
@rupertoverall To clarify, I didn’t mean my thread to be about retirement specifically! Some more toots explaining here: https://mas.to/@statto/109557111303861569 :)