Elinikä

Elinikä is a Finnish term that translates to life expectancy in English. It is a statistical measure describing the average number of years a person can be expected to live based on current mortality rates. The concept is used in demography, public health, and social statistics and can refer to life expectancy at birth or at a specified age. Life expectancy is typically calculated from life tables, which summarize the probability of dying at each age and the number of people alive at the start of each age interval.

Period life expectancy uses the mortality rates of a given calendar year to estimate the expected lifespan of a newborn today, while cohort life expectancy follows a particular birth cohort over its lifetime. These measures capture population health and survival conditions, but they have limitations: they describe averages rather than individual outcomes, and infant mortality heavily influences life expectancy at birth.

Life expectancy is shaped by many factors, including access to healthcare, disease burden, nutrition, sanitation, education, socioeconomic conditions, and lifestyle choices. It has risen markedly in many countries during the 19th and 20th centuries due to public health and medical advances, though disparities remain between regions, sexes, and income groups. In Finland, as in other developed countries, life expectancy at birth has increased substantially in recent decades, and gender gaps persist with women typically living longer than men.

See also: life expectancy, life table, cohort study.