I will start with an apology for my inadequacy -- I seem to have completely missed the birth and rapid adoption of the term healthspan in the healthcare vernacular. I launched a Google search for the healthspan and got 161,000 hits. So I am a little late on this item but will try to make up for it. Below is a definition for the term:
Healthspan: The period of a person’s life during which they are generally healthy and free from serious or chronic illness.
I will assume that a newly minted word like healthspan doesn't catch on without some reason, which is usually that it fulfills some unmet need. So let's try to puzzle out what that need is.
Until relatively recently in our history, a person was either "healthy" or "sick" and many illnesses to which we were prone such as cancer had a relatively short and ominous clinical course. By way of contrast, certain forms of malignant neoplasms are now considered chronic diseases. As we learn to control or ameliorate the effects of what were very serious diseases in the past, the burden of many of them becomes less onerous and less life-threatening.
In the past, healthspan and lifespan closely coincided. In other words, if we developed a serious disease such as an acute myocardial infarct or a malignant neoplasm, it was likely to have a fatal outcome and our life-time aligned closely with our healthy-time. Currently and by way of contrast. we can tabulate our years living with a previously perilous cancer as "healthy" if the tumor is well under control.
Because of advances in medical science, the differentiation between lifespan and healthspan has now become more meaningful and we have a semantic need to distinguish between the two. The goal of medical science is obviously to increase healthspan faster than lifespan.
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