Advancement in Health

In the recent years world has witnessed a dramatic advancement in health and medicine sectors but Apart from life expectancy, health expectancy is yet another important concept gaining popularity in the medical field. Both the concepts are useful in explaining the quality and quantity of the life of a person. For this, life expectancy is largely about the quantity of life a particular person will most likely to live, while the concept of health expectancy is about the quality of life the person can enjoy while living. In general, health expectancy can be defined as the percentage of a person life expectancy that will be spent in good health (Small Woods, 2010). In this article, we will discuss the various factors that can affect health expectancy, and suggest some possible solutions to increase the health expectancy for the benefits of people.

Many factors can contribute to low health expectancy of human beings. First of all, it is often argued that health expectancy of someone is related to gender. Generally speaking, it is well known that women have higher life expectancy than men. However, research indicates that women however, have lower health expectancy than men. This is because generally speaking, women can live longer ±but most women are found to be able to live healthily to the age of 65, as compared to the men average age of 68.2 (Small Woods, 2010). Thus, mathematically speaking, women have lower health expectancy than men.

Apart from that, health expectancy is also found to be related to the educational level of a particular person. According to Unsolder and Lowman (2004), it is commented that highly educated groups have been shown to live longer and spend less time with disability than the groups with less education. That means those highly educated persons are expected to have longer life expectancy and health expectancy.