PREDICTING FUTURE YEARS OF HEALTHY LIFE FOR OLDER ADULTS

Cost-effectiveness studies often need to compare the cost of a program to the lifetime benefits of the program, but estimates of lifetime be nefits are not routinely available, especially for older adults. We us ed data from two large longitudinal studies of older adults (ages 65-1 00) to estimate transition probabilities from one health state to anot her, and used those probabilities to estimate the mean additional year s of healthy life that an older adult of specified age, sex, and healt h status would experience. We found, for example, that 65-year-old wom en in excellent health can expect 16.8 years of healthy life in the fu ture, compared to only 8.5 years for women in poor health. We also pro vide estimates of discounted years of healthy life and future life exp ectancy. These estimates may be used to extend the effective length of the study period in cost-effectiveness studies, to examine the impact of chronic diseases or risk factors on year of healthy life, or to in vestigate the relationship of years of life to years of healthy life. Several applications are described. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc.