Healthy life expectancy among EU member states is highest in Malta, a report issued today shows.
Healthy Life Years (HLY) is a measure of disability-free life expectancy which indicates how long people can expect to live without disability.
The European Health at a Glance report says that on average across EU member states, HLY at birth in 2014 was 61.8 years for women and 61.4 years for men. It was highest in Malta and Sweden for both women and men (above 70 years), and shortest in the Slovak Republic, Latvia and Portugal for women, and in Latvia, Estonia and the Slovak Republic for men.
In Malta and Sweden, women could expect to live more than 85% of their life expectancy without limitations in their usual activities, while this proportion reached over 90% for men.
Life expectancy in Malta was recorded as 83.7 for women and 79.3 for men. The EU average was 83.6 years and 78.1 years respectively.
BREAST CANCER
The report shows that in 2013 Malta had one of the highest breast cancer death rates in the EU, second only to Croatia. Conversely, Malta was among the countries with the lowest death rates from prostate cancer.
Suicide rates in Malta were the second lowest, after Greece. The highest rates were in Lithuania, followed by Slovenia, Hungary and Latvia.
The report confirms the high levels of obesity in Malta.
Malta had the highest number of medical graduates per 100,000 population in 2014, slightly above the EU average.
The EU report, sounds a warning about the high amount of antibiotics prescribed in Malta's primary health care system.
Prescribing patterns are increasingly used as indicators of primary care quality, the report says, Antibiotics should be prescribed appropriately and only when indicated, to reduce the risk of antimicrobial resistance. There is also broad agreement that second-line antibiotics, such as quinolones and cephalosporins, should in general only be used when first-line antibiotics have not worked. Their volume as a proportion of the total volume of antibiotics prescribed has been validated as a marker of quality in the primary care setting.
In 2014, 18% of all antibiotics prescribed across EU countries were second-line antibiotics. Denmark, the United Kingdom, Sweden and the Netherlands reported the lowest proportions of second-line antibiotics use, whereas Malta had the highest, followed by Germany, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania, all of which reported volumes over 50% higher than the EU average.