Wouldn’t it be great to have a central source presenting the number of years a person is likely to live? Well, we now seem close to it as scientists from the University of California have designed a website that will gauge an individual’s life expectancy.
This initiative was taken after considering that most medical guidelines recommend doctors to take a person’s life expectancy into account. Most professionals seek one reliable index that will allow them to know the patient’s age, functional impairments and diseases to step towards an accurate prognosis in the long term.
However, there is no such agenda available now. Nevertheless, this website could serve as a relative online compendium which will help health care practitioners get additional information about the preferences of patients. This will help them take clinically-relevant decisions to increase the person’s life expectancy.
“Many medical interventions have guidelines recommending that doctors take a patient’s life expectancy into account,” remarked senior investigator Alexander K. Smith, MD, MPH, a palliative medicine doctor at the UCSF-affiliated SFVAMC.
16 of the indices need to be subjected to further individual testing for correctness in different backgrounds. Also, more analyses are required to understand if these indices could enhance clinical outcomes. However, the indices are now accessible to patients and doctors who wish to know the kind of data provided in the site.
In some cases, the index could also increase the number of interventions for healthy senior individuals with long life expectancy who may benefit from treatment. The study is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.