Potential gains in health expectancy by improving lifestyle: an application for European regions
2019
textabstractBackground: Prevention aiming at smoking, alcohol consumption, and BMI could potentially bring large gains in
life expectancy (LE) and health expectancy measures such as Healthy Life Years (HLY) and Life Expectancy in Good
Perceived Health (LEGPH) in the European Union. However, the potential gains might differ by region.
Methods: A Sullivan life table model was applied for 27 European countries to calculate the impact of alternative
scenarios of lifestyle behavior on life and health expectancy. Results were then pooled over countries to present the
potential gains in HLY and LEGPH for four European regions.
Results: Simulations show that up to 4 years of extra health expectancy can be gained by getting all countries to
the healthiest levels of lifestyle observed in EU countries. This is more than the 2 years to be gained in life
expectancy. Generally, Eastern Europe has the lowest LE, HLY, and LEGPH. Even though the largest gains in LEPGH
and HLY can also be made in Eastern Europe, the gap in LE, HLY, and LEGPH can only in a small part be closed by
changing smoking, alcohol consumption, and BMI.
Conclusion: Based on the current data, up to 4 years of good health could be gained by adopting lifestyle
as seen in the best-performing countries. Only a part of the lagging health expectancy of Eastern Europe can
potentially be solved by improvements in lifestyle involving smoking and BMI. Before it is definitely concluded that
lifestyle policy for alcohol use is of relatively little importance compared to smoking or BMI, as our findings suggest,
better data should be gathered in all European countries concerning alcohol use and the odds ratios of
overconsumption of alcohol.
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