Healthspan

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The span of life spent free of significant chronic disease and disability, as distinct from lifespan, the span of life. The distinction is the whole subject: an intervention that adds years of frailty and an intervention that removes years of frailty can produce identical life expectancy statistics. The operational proxy in international statistics is healthy life expectancy (HALE), computed by weighting years lived by disability prevalence and severity; the WHO reported global life expectancy of about 73.3 years and HALE of about 63.7 years for 2019, and about 71.4 and 61.9 respectively for 2021 after the pandemic. The roughly decade-long gap between the two has been broadly stable or slowly widening, which is evidence against Fries's strong compression hypothesis and for the rival view that added years are partly added morbidity. Healthspan has no agreed clinical definition, no single measurement instrument and no regulatory endpoint, which is why almost nothing in the field is tested against it directly.

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