But how many years of their lives people spend in good health also depends on education, a researcher from the Institute for Demography of the Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) shows in a paper published in the journal “SSM – Population Health”. In it, he compared data from 16 European countries.
Markus Sauerberg has examined how the proportion of people with a low, medium or high level of education in the total population affects the average healthy lifespan in the individual countries. A healthy year of life is defined as any year in which the respondents stated that they were not restricted in their daily life. The demographer, who has been working at the German Federal Institute for Population Research since the beginning of the year, has, among other things, the mortality data after educational qualifications from the Eurostat database, which is available for 16 countries – but not for Austria.
The connection between education and a healthy lifespan is particularly striking in Hungary: 30-year-old men with a low level of education can expect a good 24 years of healthy life on average there, while Hungarians of the same age with a high level of education can still expect almost 40 years. For women, Finland has the largest difference – with 20 healthy life years for 30-year-old women with a low level of education and 34 healthy life years for Finnish women of the same age with a high level of education. But the values for different educational groups also differ widely in other countries. The span ranges from almost five years in Romania to over 15 years in Hungary.
However, the size of the different educational groups is decisive for the overall result of a country. In Portugal, for example, around 71 percent of men have a low level of education, in Poland only 16 percent. As a result, the remaining healthy lifetime of all 30-year-old Polish men is 33.4 years. 30-year-old Portuguese, on the other hand, has a good year less on average.
This is surprising – because the values in Portugal are consistently higher for the individual educational groups. So if you compare the individual educational groups in the two countries, the Portuguese do better in terms of the remaining healthy lifespan, but not in the average of the total population.
The same applies when comparing women in Bulgaria and Italy: while Italian women have higher or similar values to Bulgarian women in all educational groups, they do worse overall. The reason is that in Bulgaria the proportion of women with a low level of education is less than half that in Italy.
With this knowledge, politicians could use health measures in a more targeted manner, Sauerberg writes in the work. Some countries – such as Portugal – could increase the average healthy lifespan of the entire population by reducing inequalities and promoting education. Other states, such as Poland, would have to aim for other structural disadvantages, such as a well-functioning health system.
Source: Nachrichten
