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Markku T. Hyyppä, Juhani Mäki, Reply to the Letter to the Editor, Health Promotion International, Volume 17, Issue 3, September 2002, Page 291, https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/17.3.291
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Extract
Thank you for inviting us to respond to the comment made by Fjalar Finnäs (‘How long do Swedish-speaking Finns live?’). We thank the commentator for his valuable remarks on the calculations of population health expectancy and age structure. We agree that it is inappropriate to conclude about mortality or life expectancy from the average age at death, and we have been fully aware of the different meanings of the latter two measures. Therefore, we calculated and used disability-free life expectancy in our paper. We also wrote: ‘Ever since epidemiological health surveys have been published in Finland, the total mortality rates have favoured the Swedish-speaking minority’ [see (Hyyppä and Mäki, 2001a)]. Accordingly, the commentator reports that the age-specific death risks for the Swedish speakers are on average markedly (20% for men) lower than the corresponding ones for Finnish speakers in the whole of Finland. He might gain more convincing evidence for the disparity in Ostrobothnia by calculating the age-specific death risks and life expectancies of the language groups in this limited geographic area. Therefore, we have good reasons to argue that the lifetime of the Swedish-speaking Finns is one of the longest known in the world.