Don't we all want to know when and how we're going to leave this earth? Well, researchers from the UK Longevity Explorer or UbbLE finally created an online death risk calculator that will somehow predict the likelihood if whether you'll die in the next few years.
The test is based on a data collected from 500,000 40 to 70-year-old participants in the United Kingdom from a study titled, UK Biobank. Lead Researchers Professor Erik Ingelsson, M.D, Ph.D and Andrea Ganna, Ph.D, created a survey composed of 11 to 13 questions that will calculate a person's risk of dying in the next five years. However, you must be aged 40 to 70 years to get a more accurate result.
Though this may not be the first death predictor test on the web, Ingelsson and Ganna believe that this test is far more accurate compared to others. "Our calculator is unique in the sense that is scientifically rigorous (not all the calculators are based on scientific evidences)," says Ganna. "Moreover, it uses a very large study (UK Biobank) for development. Finally, the selection of the variables to include in the score is un-biased and the algorithm could choose between 655 potential measurements. This increases the predictive power of our score."
So how does this test work?
With only eleven questions, Ingelsson and Gana analyzed associations between 655 health, lifestyle, and demographic variables from the Biobank research and what then happened to the participants.
The questions on the test are composed of 10 categories which include psychosocial factors, early life factors, and health history.
"The calculator was validated in 35,000 participants that were not used to create the score," says Ganna. "In this new sample, we achieved a prediction accuracy of 80 percent."
How do we interpret the results?
This calculator won't tell you exactly how long you will actually live, but rather, the chances of whether you're going to die in the next five years. So if your result is 4%, that would mean that if you're in a group of 100 people who have the same gender, risk profile, and age, 4 of you would be able to live on in the next five years. But again, it wouldn't be necessarily be you, according to a report in Huffingtonpost.
Skeptics may think that this test is only for Brits but Ingelsson and Ganna confirm that the test's prediction will still work well for people from other countries. "It is likely that the prediction works fairly well in countries that are similar to UK in terms of distribution of demographic and socioeconomic factors, provision of healthcare and lifestyle and risk factor distribution," they say.
You can take the test here.
