Life expectancy in Switzerland has been growing steadily for decades. But have these additional years been spent in good health or, on the contrary, do they only prolong the ills of an aging population? In an attempt to answer this question, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, collated data from the Swiss National Cohort (SNC) and the Swiss Health Surveys between 1990 and 2015, all within the framework of the “LIVES” National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR LIVES).

The results, which are published in the International Journal of Public Health, show that although the life expectancy of the Swiss population as a whole is growing, people who only attended compulsory schooling are living longer in poor health. Between 1990 and 2015, the life expectancy of Swiss men rose from 78 to 82 years, while for Swiss women it increased from 83 to 86 years. But are these additional years of life spent in good health or do they only prolong the development of morbidity?

“The principle of morbidity expansion means that, yes, life expectancy is on the rise, but that these same individuals are spending more years in poor health before they finally die,” explains Adrien Remund, a researcher at the Institute of Demography and Socioeconomics in UNIGE’s Faculty of Social Sciences (SDS), and first author of the study. The UNIGE demographers and medical sociologists calculated the increase in Swiss life expectancy using data from the Swiss National Cohort (SNC), which records everyone who ever lived in Switzerland from 1990 to 2015.

“This enabled us to track over 11,650,000 people, including migratory movements and 1.47 million deaths,” states Michel Oris, a professor at the Institute of Demography and Socioeconomics. The researchers then cross-referenced this information with data from the Swiss Health Surveys (which took place every five years during the period 1990-2015) to ascertain how many years of healthy life expectancy the Swiss population had gained over 25 years. “We found that the number of healthy years increases in parallel with life expectancy at national level,” says Adrien Remund.

Between 1950 and 2015, men lived five years longer, including 4.5 years in good health. Women, meanwhile, gained three years in good health, a figure identical to their increase in life expectancy. “Women have a smaller gap in increased life expectancy because they already live much longer, so the progression is necessarily lower than for men,” explains Stéphane Cullati, a researcher in the SDS Institute of Sociological Research at UNIGE, where he works alongside Stefan Sieber, the study’s co-author. But are these patterns identical across the entire Swiss population?

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