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Wednesday 21 August 2013

Upsides

Apparently, one of the upsides of dying young is that I will never have to be old and incontinent.  Or lose my mind - though that's questionable even now.

But am I really dying young?  In the grand scheme of things and with a historical perspective, late 40's is quite a ripe old age really.  Had I been born 200 years ago, I probably wouldn't have made it out of infancy.  Even today, should I have been born in Zimbabwe, my life expectancy would be around 43.

It is all a bit of a pickle statistically though, this life expectancy thing.  Apparently the trick is to live to adulthood, then your life span becomes longer.  Huh?

In classical Roman times, when you were born, your life expectancy (ie the average age of death) was 28.  However, should you manage to hang on until you were 15, the life expectancy figure raised to 52.

And and and, then they throw in figures for a "healthy life" expectancy, as opposed to a life expectancy.

"World Health Organization publishes statistics called Healthy life expectancy (HALE), defined as the average number of years that a person can expect to live in "full health", excluding the years lived in less than full health due to disease and/or injury"

Some of you will know what I think about WHO and their statistics in relation to BMI (which is a population screen, not a measure of physical or mental health, other than in a vague handwaving, you look fine, kind of way).

I am somewhat bemused that I cannot work out my HALE but am working on the whole "I lived to be an adult - whoop" thing.





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