Life expectancy in Scotland has increased slightly for both males and females, but has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels.
The latest report from National Records of Scotland shows that life expectancy at birth was 80.9 years for females and 76.9 years for males in the period 2021-23.
Compared to the estimate for 2020-2022, this is an increase of about 14 weeks for males and almost seven weeks for females.
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However, Scotland continues to have the lowest life expectancy of any western nation in the European Union.
For the past decade, Scotland's life expectancy for males has come to resemble Eastern European levels - something that is also increasingly the case for females.
“Today’s figures are still below the peak of 10 to 12 years ago.”
Life expectancy at birth is an estimate of how long a person is likely to live assuming that current conditions never altered during that lifetime.
In that sense, it is not really a prediction of longevity but rather a snapshot of the prevailing disease and lifestyle conditions during a given period.
This is why the period of the pandemic - when Covid caused a sudden and unusual spike in premature deaths - resulted in a decline in life expectancy.
Historically, life expectancy was steadily increasing in Scotland between the early 1980s and early 2010s.
Between 2000-2002 and 2012-2014, life expectancy was increasing by almost 10 weeks per year for females and around 16 weeks per year for males.
From 2012-2014 until 2018-20, gains in life expectancy plateaued, before decreasing for the first time during the pandemic.
The latest figures remain lower than the pre-pandemic peaks of 77.1 for males, and 81.2 for females.
However, based on long-term trends, the report forecasts that life expectancy in Scotland will reach 83.4 years for females and to 80.1 years for males by 2045.
Life expectancy is also strongly linked to deprivation.
Female life expectancy in 2021-23 was 10.5 years lower in the most deprived areas compared with the least deprived, while for males it lagged 13.2 years behind.
East Renfrewshire - an one of the least deprived parts of the country - has the highest life expectancy, at 84.5 for females and 81 for males, while the City of Glasgow has the lowest, at 78.3 and 73.6 years.
Life expectancy was highest in remote rural areas and lowest in large urban areas.
Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour’s health spokeswoman, said the Scottish Government "must explain why Scotland is languishing at the bottom of the Western European life expectancy league table and lagging behind other devolved nations."
She added: “We should all have a decent chance of a healthy life, wherever we are born.
“The SNP must tackle drugs deaths urgently, reduce NHS waiting lists, improve public health and invest in life sciences so that Scottish families know that their children can grow up to have long and healthy lives.”
A Scottish Government spokesman said: "Today's figures show a welcome increase in life expectancy - the highest annual improvement over the past decade.
"We're determined to go further, that's why we're focused on action to drive improvements in population health which will help to tackle health inequalities.
"Deprivation is a significant driver of excess mortality and reducing poverty and inequality remains the best way of improving life expectancy, and since 2022-23, we continue to allocate around £3 billion a year to policies which tackle poverty and protect people as far as possible during the ongoing cost-of-living crisis."
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