The Changing Meaning of Aging: Historical Trends and Forecasts

Maria Filomena Mendes, CIDEHUS.UE, University of Évora
Filipe Ribeiro, CIDEHUS.UE, University of Évora
Lidia Patricia Tome, CIDEHUS.UE, University of Évora

“How long will we live?” is one of the most important questions that every individual would like to answer. Oeppen and Vaupel (2002) didn’t answer to this question, but demonstrated that life expectancy is breaking old theorized limits and with time every human can expect to live longer and with improved health (Vaupel, 2010). These changes have profound implications, not only for individuals, but also for society and the economy. Thus, the meaning of aging needs to be methodically re-evaluated and conventional measures of aging, as life expectancy at birth, need to be complemented with additional and innovative insights, allowing to present a wide perspective about lifespan, late life autonomy and frailty. The postponement of mortality is, nowadays, intimately connected with the emergence of the extremely old share of population, what was rare until around middle of last century (Vaupel, 2010). In Portugal, e.g., centenarians increased more than three-fold between 2010 and 2015, and age 75 is now seen as the new 65 in what concerns the remaining average lifespan.

Nowadays increasing lifespan is intimately related with improvements in survival after age 65, and thus, a coherent old-age mortality forecast will contribute with less biased forecasts to the female and male old-age mortality in Europe. We use Oeppen’s (2008) and Bergeron-Boucher et al. (2017) Compositional Data Analysis (CoDa) proposals, already proved to present very accurate results, not only to (1) forecast remaining life expectancy at older ages; (2) but mainly to re-examine the changing meaning of aging from the historical perspective and providing insights for the future; (3) analysing why an increasing lifespan may or may not be a synonymous of late life autonomy or frailty; (4) estimate the cause-specific probability of death at later ages; and (5) to evaluate the possible sex convergence in old-age mortality.

Presented in Poster Session 4