TEHRAN - The chairman of women’s health conference, which was held in Shiraz University, says life expectancy has reached 81 for Iranian women and 76 for Iranian men, IRNA reported on Thursday.

Life expectancy is a statistical measure of how long a person or organism may live, based on the year of their birth, their current age and other demographic factors including gender. At a given age, life expectancy is the average number of years that is likely to be lived by a group of individuals exposed to the same mortality conditions until they die.

Kamran Bagheri Lankarani said that the figures reveal that healthcare system in Iran has improved. However, he said, if effective health policies are not employed, the increase in life expectancy will no longer be a positive issue.

Bagheri Lankarani who was making the remarks in the opening ceremony of the conference on Wednesday did not clarify how much the life expectancy was earlier.

He said that statistics show that an average 16 years of Iranian women’s life and 13 years of men are spent with disability.

According to Bagheri Lankarani, cardiovascular disease and stroke make up 10 percent of disability in women, skeletal disorders and bone disease 13 percent, and psychiatric diseases 15 percent.

Bagheri Lankarani also said that 27 percent of Iranian women are suffering from obesity, and 35 percent are overweight, and an aggregate of 60 percent of Iranian women are fat.

He also said that smoking is getting popular among 21 percent of men and four percent of women, adding that “women have outnumbered men in smoking hookah in the recent years”.

He added women are more prone to disease due to their physiological condition such as pregnancy, milking, and menopause, therefore improving their health condition come to be of more importance than before.

The two-day conference which was held in cooperation with one of Holland’s universities and some Canadian institutions were about reproductive health, sport and women’s health, community nutrition, communicable and non-communicable diseases, health promotion, and psycho-social aspect of women’s health