Sharon Butler considers herself a pretty healthy 66-year-old. The suburban Vancouver mother of two follows a healthy diet, never smoked, drinks alcohol moderately, walks about 16,000 steps every day and kayaks several times a month for about three hours a trip.
She’s also a good sleeper: “I put my head on the pillow and I’m gone” for eight hours a night, she says.
She sports a rosy glow, has no health issues, and maintains a positive, optimistic outlook on life, even while under stress.
Still, she wondered: “How long will I live?”
When a friend told her about an online calculator, called
Project Big Life
, that purports to answer that very question, she jumped on it. After filling out a three-minute questionnaire, which asked such basic questions as her age, sex, ethnicity, education, as well as lifestyle habits like smoking, drinking and exercise, Butler learned she would live to the ripe old age of 90.
“I didn’t have any expectation [about a number],” she says. Relatives on her mother’s side of the family lived up to 95, but her sister died of cancer in her fifties. “I just live life,” she shrugs.
Winning the numbers game
Doctors, particularly in the U.S. have long used risk calculators, such as
ePrognosis
, to determine “time to benefit” interventions for their patients. For example, would those patients benefit from certain medicines or procedures based on not just their age but on their health status and life expectancy. Others, such as
MedCalc
, estimates everything from stroke risk, arterial pressure and body mass index, while the Mayo Clinic’s
GALAD
calculator assesses complications of liver disease.