My last post described a new website that tells elderly persons the chances that they will die within a given number of years (eprognosis.org). Did I want to know my own odds? Of course. But I entered the site with some trepidation. First of all, I had to assert that I’m a medical care professional. The assertion is not checked and is thus an implicit invitation for laypersons to enter the site, but even so lying is not pleasant. Second, I was afraid of what I might find. The site was presumably locked. Would I be like Bluebeard’s wives, unable to resist unlocking the forbidden door?
And after all, if I found that my chances of living much longer were small, would I change my behavior in any way? Would I stop flossing my teeth? Would I eat as much ice cream as I wanted? I probably wouldn’t buy a red sports car, that classic response to crises of masculine aging, because I can no longer pretzel myself into one. But would I stop exercising? Most likely I would continue to live just as I do now, in the knowledge that after all the indices are fallible and even if I had, say, a 80% chance of dying in the next four years, there would still be a 20% chance that I won’t. So what would be the point of finding out? Why did Bluebeard’s wives unlock that door?
But I did enter the site and as I did so I figured that if the statistics disturbed me I could discuss them with my doctors and learn what if anything I should be doing to improve my odds or, if that’s not possible, to tell them my wishes for end of life care.
This is what I found out. The Lee index gives me a 20%-28% chance of dying within the next four years. Perhaps I should have stopped there. But, no, I kept poking around in the closet. The Schonberg index gives me a 63%-73% chance of dying within the next five years and an 86% - 96% percent chance of dying within the next nine years. The difference between the Lee and Schonberg indices lies not only in the length of the period predicted but also in the factors that are considered, with the Schonberg indices including more debilitating factors than the Lee index.
Well, I’ve already done well to reach 80, and after all the chances are 27%-37% that I’ll manage to reach 85. As an old boss of mine used to say, that’s better than a hole in your shoe. Still, I looked for another opinion. I found one in the USA Today article about these indices http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/story/2012-02-19/Do-seniors-really-want-to-know-life-expectancy/53158420/1. It reported that Dr. David Reuben, head of geriatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine, is working on an index that gives a "firm" prediction of longevity. In a version published in 2010, he found that “a high-functioning 80-year-old man can expect 7.2 more years.” Since I consider myself “high-functioning,” I can, according to that provisional index, reasonably hope to reach 87. Not content to leave well enough alone, however, I turned to an eprognosis.org link to a non-medical actuarial calculator for life expectancy. It told me, after I completed its questionnaire, that I have a life expectancy of 90.2, with 75% chance of reaching 85.9 and a 25% chance of reaching 93.9. These last predictions are no doubt overly optimistic in my case, but I'll take them. And if there's at least a 50% chance that I'll live ten more years (so much more comforting than the Schonberg index that gives me an 86%-96% chance of dying within the next nine years), then perhaps I should I should take up yoga so that I can enter and exit a sports car with grace.
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