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Functional health among Canadian adults has declined over the last decade with young adults reporting the sharpest decline, according to a new Statistics Canada report.
The report compared data collected from the Canadian Community Health Survey in 2015, 2019 and 2024, which asked respondents aged 18 and older functional health questions.
The report said functional health is measured using the Health Utilities Index Mark 3, which examines eight health attributes: Vision, hearing, speech, cognition, dexterity, mobility, emotional health and pain.
“The attributes can then be combined into a multi-attribute score summarizing the individual’s overall functional health status. A score of 0.89 to 1.00 indicates very good to perfect functional health, while scores below 0.89 indicate moderate to poor functional health,” the report said.
Younger adults facing declining emotional health
Functional health declined overall among all adults over the last decade with those with “very good” or “perfect” health dropping from 68.6% in 2015 to 56.4% in 2024, the report said.
It said the decline was “largely due to deteriorating emotional health and the increasing prevalence of pain.”
From 2015 to 2024, functional health remained about the same for Canadians 75 years and older, but it decreased for all younger age groups with 18- to 34-year-olds experiencing the sharpest decline.
The percentage of those younger adults with “very good” or “perfect” health dropped from 73.4% in 2015 to 60.1% in 2024, while those aged 35 to 49 also experienced a similar decline, dropping from 73% in 2015 to 60.4% in 2024.
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Meanwhile, the percentage of adults older than 75 with “very good” or “perfect” health dropped slightly, going from 44.6% in 2015 to 42.7% in 2024.
“In all years, Canadians aged 75 and older had lower functional health than younger age groups, while among all adults aged 18 and older, females had worse functional health than males,” the report noted.
Emotional health, measured as the percentage who are happy and interested in life, decreased more than any other attribute for all age groups, declining from 78.3% in 2015 to 61.2% in 2024, the report said.
While emotional health was similar across all age groups in 2015, the reported noted that in 2024, those aged 18 to 34 had worse emotional health than those aged 50 and older.
Geographically, while adults across all provinces experienced declines in functional health, Nova Scotia (47.7%) and and New Brunswick (48.3%) had the lowest functional health, while Quebec (65.6%) had the highest functional health.
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