Life Expectancy

[Guest guest]

Hi folks:

When the term life expectancy is used, it generally is intended to

mean expected age at death of a newborn infant: " When you read a

headline saying for instance that American life expectancy has

increased but is below Japan's, it is always using what might be

called " life expectancy at birth " , or more precisely the expected age

at death for a newborn infant " .

Source: http://comp9.psych.cornell.edu/Darlington/lifespan.htm

The above is a useful piece explaining a few of the details about the

calculation of life expectancy. But even the definition above is

somewhat ambiguous. Does it mean the life expectancy of a child born

today? If so then that may have only marginal relevance to the

lifespan of those of us who were not born today. Or even yesterday.

( " I was NOT born yesterday " !)

So here is another source which gives life expectancies at ages from

zero to 80, going back to the year 1850.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

From this table I can see that I have already reached my life

expectancy at birth as of the year I was born. However, since I am

still here then I could probably expect to live to age 74 based on

the life expectancy given in that table for someone my current age

for the year of my birth.

But should I be looking at the row corresponding to my year of birth

to determine my life expectancy from here on? Or should I look at

the data for 2003, the latest shown, and use the number in the column

corresponding to my age in 2003? In that case the life expectancy

table suggests an age at death of between 80 and 81.

Does anyone know which row I should be looking at?

[Of course the average person, from whom the data in the table were

collected, are not on CRON, and have a BMI approaching 30. I am

still not at what I would consider to be a full-CRON weight. But the

average weight/BMI for people my age is more than 30% higher than my

weight. So I am getting there. Gradually!]

Rodney.