Life expectancy

[hettie555]

So this isn't strictly Covid related, but I read on this board that life expectancy isn't actually 80 / 84 in the Uk, as if you make it to 80 you are very likely to make it to 89.
If you make it to 90 what is your life expectancy then?

Can someone explain it to me in simple terms, I've googled, but can't get my head around it! Even better it there was a calculator where you can put your current age in and it would tell you how old you might be expected to live?

Here you go @hettie555

ONS link

The way I think about it is, the longer you have lived, the more likely you are to keep living. The average life expectancy is worked out including childhood deaths. If you survive childhood you are more likely to live to about 89 as per the calculator above.

It's why historical life expectancy always looks really low. They had very high rates of infant mortality which makes the number artificially low. People in the 1700s were not all dying at the age of 35 but so many died as small children it brought the average down to that number.

Oddly my mother in law, who was born in the. interwar years, has 5 years higher life expectancy than me.

Statistics are often screwed by anomalies, and can be manipulated to show a particular agenda. It's always more complicated than it at first seems. Average longevity has stalled, but we have more extremely elderly than at any time in history, hence high death death numbers for this age group and long waiting lists for hips and knees.

😱

Strangely for pension annuities is is at the high end of scale, I think mine was about 92, the link above tells me 87 at the age of 62

PennyDreadful 😱 No way!

If I put 55 in it says 86, if I put DM in at 92, it says 96. Bloody hell, she's going to get to 100. There goes the inheritance ☹️😂

Life is a series of hazards. Simplifying it, all sorts of things when you're a baby, accidents and a few serious illnesses from then on until older age when rather more illnesses kick in.

So if you look at a group of people born in a particular year, the average age of death may be 80, say.

But if you look at that group of people 20 years on, and just the people who are still alive, not the ones who have died in infancy and childhood. They've already survived infancy and now have a good chance of making it through their young adult years, so the average age at death of this group may now by 82.

Or looking at it another way - life expectancy is the average of ages at death ranging from 0 to 117 (I think the current oldest women in the UK is 116). But life expectancy of, say, 60 year olds, is an average of ages of death from 60 to 117. So not surprising it should be higher.

Sorry, I do understand the concept.
Looking at deaths in my friends/families It does seem that if you can get through your 60s/70s (heart disease/cancer etc) then you are likely to live into your 90s.
But I couldn't work out from what I'd googled online I couldn't work out where it makes the jumps.

Thanks WwK.

at people checking elderly rich relatives life-expectancy (in my life it's always the nice ones who die young, the horrid ones hang on forever!)

Apparently, mine is 87.

My aunt lived to 113, my granny to 107, my grandma died last year at 94 and my other grandma is 90 and still literally running around. I'm hoping I've got good genes!

I am 65, My life expectancy is around 88.
I put my age in as 88 and prediction is 90 something.
I kept repeating it putting my age as the previous prediction.

I reached 105 before I my chances of surviving another year was less than 50%. No thanks - I don't want to live that long.

@Baaaahhhhh

Statistics are often screwed by anomalies, and can be manipulated to show a particular agenda. It's always more complicated than it at first seems. Average longevity has stalled, but we have more extremely elderly than at any time in history, hence high death death numbers for this age group and long waiting lists for hips and knees.

Absolutely this.

Especially when you talk about 'average life expectancy' in countries/past populations where people had to overcome a number of hazards over their lifetimes.

You could say that a person has a life expectancy of 45, which sounds pretty awful, but if the mean average life expectation has been calculated as an average of people who face significant risk of death in early childhood due to disease and poor health, then death in 20/30s due to industrial accidents or childbirth that can bring down the average massively and if you survive both these hazards you could have a good chance of living well into your 80/90s.

Illustrated by numbers, 3 people with an average life expectancy of 45 could have lived until 4, 38 and 94

@PennyDreadfuI its because you've got the 0 in front of your age - take that off and it will give you a much longer life expectancy ;)

To some extent this whole “deaths from covid are at an older age than uk life expectancy” is a median/mean/mode issue. Nobody dies at age 160 but some people die at age zero. In the past those infants skewed the mean age (which is what life expectancy is) down massively, and even today they bring it down noticeably. So the mean life expectancy at birth for a UK woman is 83, the median age at death is 86 and the modal age at death is 89.

Am now on there ONS link checking everyone I know. Anyone else?

Got to wait a few more years for the inheritance from Dh (old cow) of a gran. MIL will not be pleased that grans life expectancy (her MIL) is 99

I've got visions of @PennyDreadfuI running around trying to live her best life now she knows she's only got a year!