That's men for you: Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Back in 1926, a male baby could expect at birth to live for just over 57 years. In 2002, a male baby could expect to live for 75 years. That's the least you'd expect. After nearly a century of advances in living conditions and medicine, it would be a very odd thing indeed if life expectancy had not increased significantly.
All of which should be really good news for people in middle age and beyond. Consider a man aged 55 in 1926 as against a man aged 55 in 2006. How much do you think that this man has gained in life expectancy compared to his 1920s counterpart?
Remember that since 1926 we have developed state-of-the-art hospitals with incredibly expensive equipment and doctors trained up to the gills in treatments their predecessors could only have dreamt of. And remember that compared to the Irish people of 80 years ago, we are remarkably well off.
So what have we gained in years?
The answer is that a 55-year-old man today can expect to live for about four years longer than his counterpart in 1926. Back then, a 55-year-old man could expect to live for another 19 years. Today it's 23 years.
To put it bluntly, despite all the time that has passed and despite all the positive developments in the meantime, we have got more or less nowhere in terms of life expectancy at that age.
Life expectancy at birth is so much greater now than it was in 1926 because we have reduced infant and child mortality to one of the lowest rates in the world. This means that far more of us get to grow up and grow old - that's the gain from the advances of the past 80 years. But from age 55 onwards, the improvement in terms of life expectancy ends.
Women do better than men, but not all that much better. The baby girl born today can expect to live about 22 years longer than a baby girl born in 1926, a very substantial gain. The 55-year-old woman today can expect to live until she's 82, about seven years longer than a 55-year-old woman in 1926. That's better than how the men are doing but it isn't all that much better.
Now, do you ever have a sneaking suspicion that you might live to be, say, 120? Look at what they're doing with gene therapy and new drugs. Look at the pensions industry, creaking under the strain of people living for ages.
But hold on. A 75-year-old man today can expect to live for another nine years - just one year more than his counterpart in 1926. A 75-year-old woman today can expect to live for another 11 years - a gain of three years.
We really haven't cracked the code when it comes to the mortality thing, have we?
What's going on? If you look back over the past 60 years or so, you will see that we have made poor progress in relation to heart disease. Sixty years ago, heart disease accounted for 25 per cent of deaths and today the figure is the same. Meanwhile, the proportion of Irish people dying from cancer has increased steadily over the decades from about nine per cent 60 years ago to 25 per cent today.
Much (though not all) heart disease and cancer arise from lifestyle - smoking, poor diet and lack of exercise for instance. What that might mean is that if we want to beat the odds, it is to lifestyle we have to look and not to technology.
I say "might mean" because our life expectancy figures are not all that different from those of other European countries and are better than some. For instance our life expectancy is somewhat similar to that of the Dutch, who seem to have everything worked out.
So the figures suggest that when it comes to living longer, those wonderful medics with their gleaming machines may have reached the limits of what they can do.
•Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. pomorain@irish-times.ie