Quality-Adjusted Life Expectancy (QALE) is an intuitive summary metric, which combines information on mortality with information on health. In contrast to Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE), QALE moves away from a binary perspective on health (healthy at age X vs. unhealthy at age X+1) by capturing health on a more granular scale across the entire life course. The described research pipeline estimates QALE - alongside other summary health metrics such as Life Expectancy and Lifespan Variation - for Local Authority Districts in Scotland, England, and Wales based on publicly available data. This README file provides general guidance on how to run and control the underlying research pipeline.
In order to run the research pipeline in its entity from start to finish, there are three important pre-requisites:
1. Software: Ensure you have installed a recent version of R (Version 4.2 or higher) and R Studio (Build 485 or higher). You do not need to install and load packages yourself. The program will examine this and react - if required - on the fly.
2. Survey Data: Register with UK Data Service and download Understanding Society - General License Version. The data set is free and publicly available. Once you have registered with UK data service and agreed to the terms and conditions of using Understanding Society data, you can download all waves. Store the downloaded X_indresp_dta files of waves e to j in the program folder RData/UnderstandingSociety/. For example for wave e the final path would be: RData/UnderstandingSociety/e_indresp_dta. You can also skip this stage, in which case you answer "no" in the prompted dialog when running the pipeline. In this case, EQ-5D utility scores derived from wave j of Understanding Society are loaded by default, limiting the cross-sectional analysis to the year of 2019.
3. Mortality Data: Create a Human Mortality Database (HMD) Account for data queries using the following link to the HMD website - former version. We are using the former version of the HMD, as the new version does not proide an API (yet). When running the program you will be prompted to enter your username and password for this website.
Once these pre-requisites have been fulfilled, you can open the project file QALE_Exemplar.Rproj in the main program folder. This will prompt a new RStudio Session. You can then open and run the main control file of the program 01_main.R (CTRL + A then CTRL + ENTER). All results will be stored in the folder ROutput/. You are free to change parameters in the definitions section of the main control file 01_main.R , for example change the year of the cross-sectional analysis [Line 75 - Line 95]. The pipeline might break the very first time you run it - likely due to the fact that the RSession ist not able to immediately fetch from online sources - just re-run everything again and it should work.
After you have run the pipeline sucessfully, you will recieve output detailing and visualizing the following population health summary metrics
- Life Expectancy: ex
- Life Span Variation (absolute, years of life lost): e_dagger
- Life Span Variation (relative, Keyfitz' entropy ): h
- Quality Adjusted Life Expectancy: QALE
Please direct all bug reports to andreas.hoehn@glasgow.ac.uk
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Title: Estimating Quality-Adjusted Life Expectancy (QALE) for Local Authority Districts in the UK
Author: Andreas Höhn
Version: Beta 0.9
Updated: 2022-08-24