Life expectancy provides an indication of health status across different population groups. Many factors can impact life expectancy, including gender, age, diet, genetics and disease risk. Life expectancy data can be used to compare health across different countries, cultures and socio-economic groups. Life expectancy can be expressed as average number of years that an individual is expected to live, ‘period life’ expectancy uses mortality rates from a single year or group of years and assumes that those rates apply throughout the remainder of a persons life1,2.

Mortality data may be expressed as a summary gure representing all-cause mortality or can be broken down to speci c disease incidence, such as mortality from cardiovascular disease or cancer.