Glossary
Compression of morbidity
James Fries's 1980 proposal that illness at the end of life could be squeezed into a shorter span if its onset were delayed faster than death. Measured as the distance between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, the gap has widened instead, though whether morbidity has genuinely expanded remains an open argument.
Published Updated
Where this comes from
In the reference topic that owns this term
Reference topic 36, Why We Die the Way We Do, states the mismatch as a card: what the system evolved to expect, what it gets instead, and what happens in the gap.
Mismatch card
- What it expects
A body that moves, eats, defends, senses and socializes in the conditions of Parts Two to Seven, with death arriving mostly from outside (infection, accident, violence) after a modal age in the seventies.
- What it gets
Those conditions removed one at a time, with medical treatment supplied for each resulting failure.
- What happens in the gap
Ten causes take 70.9% of US deaths, six of them substantially modifiable, and the United States carries the world's widest healthspan-lifespan gap at 12.4 years.
Related terms
The argument behind this term, its studies and its notes are in Reference topic 36 of the reference library. The book gives the practical version. Get the book.