Past and future life expectancy increases at later ages: their implications for the linkage of chronic morbidity, disability, and mortality.

Recently life expectancy increases have been noted at advanced ages in the United States. This means a more rapid growth of the elderly U.S. population in general, and of the "oldest-old" population in particular. Thus it is of considerable social and health policy interest to forecast the direction and magnitude of future changes in life expectancy at later ages and the changes in the prevalence of health and disability at later ages consequent to the increases in life expectancy. In the analysis, several prior efforts to predict life expectancy changes using standard demographic techniques are reviewed and reasons for the limitations of such efforts suggested. Results show that mortality changes at advanced ages have very different relations to risk factors than at earlier ages. The analysis also shows that linking morbidity, disability, and mortality in a complete projection of population health changes will require the extension of standard demographic methodologies to utilize information from multiple data sources.