A methodological proposal for estimating disability transition rates from cross-sectional health surveys: application to Brazil

This paper proposes a new method to estimate disability transition rates from national cross-sectional health surveys. The proposed method estimates age-specific transition rates from cross-sectional data according to well-documented longitudinal age-specific health transition rates of other populations, used as standards, and the proportion of health and unhealthy individuals by age, reported in cross-sectional datasets. In order to estimate healthy life expectancy, this paper makes use of most recent Brazilian health survey data The preliminary results indicate that the estimated disability transition rates are consistent with the current literature. Moreover, the estimated parameters for the simple model specification seem to produce very reliable results. In 1998, 2003 and 2008 the estimated life expectancy – with and without any disability – do not show significant statistical differences from other estimates, produced by other methods.
A second exercise will be conducted by estimating the parameters including covariates: sex, race and education and to estimate differentials in healthy life expectancy.