Research led by CEPAR Associate Investigator Dr Kim Kiely investigates whether our extra years of life are healthy ones.
A new study by Senior Research Fellow Dr Kim Kiely, CEPAR Deputy Director Scientia Professor Kaarin Anstey, CEPAR Associate Investigator Professor Carol Jagger and Dr Richard Tawiah offers new evidence on social disparities in disability-free life expectancy trends in Australia by examining how these trends have varied by gender, socioeconomic position and severity of disability.
The results reveal a complex picture of healthy population ageing, highlighting gender differences and widening social inequalities in disability free life expectancy.
Over a 10-year period, there were greater improvements in the years lived free from disability for men than for women, and people living in low-advantage areas had more years lived with a disability than those in high-advantage areas.
The study is one of the first to use nationally representative cohort data to show how underlying disability-mortality transitions contribute to trends in disability-free life expectancy, and to examine the extent to which these trends have been distributed equally throughout the population, in particular to those aged 50 years and over.
Tawiah R, Jagger C, Anstey KJ, Kiely K. M. (2021): Trends in Disability-Free Life Expectancy at Age 50 Years in Australia Between 2001 and 2011 by Social Disadvantage. J Epidemiol Community Health Published Online First: 28 April 2021. doi: 10.1136/jech-2020-214906