ArticleJournal of the American Statistical Association2007
On the Estimation of Disability-Free Life Expectancy: Sullivan' Method and Its Extension.
Article in Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2007. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
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- Bridging survival analysis and machine learning to improve healthy life expectancy estimation using PHR records.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Educational and gender disparities in work, retirement, and disability-pension expectancies: a cross-country analysis of Italy and Finland.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2026Article
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- Changes in Disability, Severe Disability, and Dependence in Spain (1986-2020).International journal of public health · 2025Article
- Disability and its impact on life expectancy: heterogeneity across Mexican states.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Healthy Aging in Colombia 2018 and Its Variation in Relation to Social Conditions.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Observational
- Structural disadvantages to the kin network from intergenerational racial health inequities.Social forces; a scientific medium of social study and interpretation · 2024Article
- Educational Inequalities in Dual-Function Life Expectancy.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2024Article
- Trends in severe functional limitations among working and non-working adults in Germany: Towards an (un)-healthy working life?European journal of ageing · 2024Article
- Age and sex-specific disability-free life expectancy in urban and rural settings of Bangladesh.Population health metrics · 2024Article
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- Trends in Healthy Life Years Between 2005 and 2019 in 31 European Countries: The Compression or Expansion of Morbidity?International journal of public health · 2024Article
- Life Course Patterns of Prescription Drug Use in the United States.Demography · 2023Article
- Estimation of disability free life expectancy in non small cell lung cancer based on real world data.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Lifetime years married held steady for men with a BA degree since 1960 but dropped to lowest level since 1880 for men without a BA.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Racial-Ethnic Disparities in Dual-Function Life Expectancy.The journals of gerontology. Series A, Biological sciences and medical sciences · 2023Article
- Structural Inequities in the Kin Safety Net: Mapping the Three-Generational Network throughout Early AdulthoodAJS; American journal of sociology · 2023Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
A rapidly aging population, such as the United States today, is characterized by the increased prevalence of chronic impairment. Robust estimation of disability-free life expectancy (DFLE), or healthy life expectancy, is essential for examining whether additional years of life are spent in good health and whether life expectancy is increasing faster than the decline of disability rates. Over 30 years since its publication, Sullivan's method remains the most widely used method to estimate DFLE. Therefore, it is surprising to note that Sullivan did not provide any formal justification of his method. Debates in the literature have centered around the properties of Sullivan's method and have yielded conflicting results regarding the assumptions required for Sullivan's method. In this article we establish a statistical foundation of Sullivan's method. We prove that, under stationarity assumptions, Sullivan's estimator is unbiased and consistent. This resolves the debate in the literature, which has generally concluded that additional assumptions are necessary. We also show that the standard variance estimator is consistent and approximately unbiased. Finally, we demonstrate that Sullivan's method can be extended to estimate DFLE without stationarity assumptions. Such an extension is possible whenever a cohort life table and either consecutive cross-sectional disability surveys or a longitudinal survey are available. Our empirical analysis of the 1907 and 1912 U.S. birth cohorts suggests that while mortality rates remain approximately stationary, disability rates decline during this time period.
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