CHICAGO - It sounds like a perfect parlor game for baby boomers suddenly confronting their own mortality: What are your chances of dying within four years? Researchers have come up with 12 risk factors to try to answer that for people over age 50.
This is one game where you want a low score. Zero to 5 points says your risk of dying in four years is less than 4 percent. With 14 points, your risk rises to 64 percent.
The quiz is designed "to try to help doctors and families get a firmer sense for what the future may hold," to help plan health care accordingly, says lead author Dr. Sei Lee, a geriatrics researcher at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, who helped develop it.
This test is roughly 81 percent accurate and can give older people a reasonable idea of their survival chances, Lee and his colleagues say.
