Abstract
Increasing life expectancy and a growing share of older people around the world spotlight the issue of health during additional years of life. Research on trends of proportions of older people with activity limitations for low and middle income countries is sparse. We use data from the World Health Survey and the UN World Population Prospects to predict prevalence of activity limitations for 23 low and middle income countries for the upcoming 30 years. Our projections highlight huge variation in the proportion of older adults with limitations across investigated countries and this variation is not expected to diminish. However, these countries are facing considerable demographic changes and even though prevalence rates appear almost constant, absolute numbers are changing which require policy interventions. Furthermore, variations across countries reflect not only disparities in health conditions, but also differences in cultural peculiarities of reporting and historical perception of health.
Highlights
Increasing life expectancy and a growing share of older people around the world spotlight the issue of health during additional years of life
It is important to note, that pronounced differences in prevalence of severe activity limitations among selected countries might be to a large extent attributed to the different style of reporting subjective conditions of activity limitations
We still find quite some differences across countries (Table 5, Fig. 1) with every fourth man in Tunisia and Georgia aged about 60 reporting activity limitations while the same rate was reached by men in Malaysia and China at about 90 years in 2017. In this analysis of WHO and United Nations data, we studied self-reports in activity limitations of older adults in 23 low and middle income countries
Summary
Increasing life expectancy and a growing share of older people around the world spotlight the issue of health during additional years of life. Our projections highlight huge variation in the proportion of older adults with limitations across investigated countries and this variation is not expected to diminish These countries are facing considerable demographic changes and even though prevalence rates appear almost constant, absolute numbers are changing which require policy interventions. In many lower-middle and low income countries the proportion of young people remained high while life expectancy increased in particular within the last decade. The share of older adults with severe activity limitations in Europe is expected to remain constant, even though an increase in absolute numbers is expected[5,6] These studies on upper middle and high income countries might guide some ideas about global future disability trends. We focus on males and females above age 50 applying an innovative methodology of forecasting[5,19]
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