Being male, smoking after age 30, and having difficulty walking 100 meters increase the likelihood of dying in the near future for people over age 50.
The Trinity College study has identified 14 independent risk factors that reduce the odds of mortality in people of that age group in Ireland in the next four years. The research, the first of its kind here, used data from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Aging (TILDA) to pinpoint factors that increase the likelihood of imminent death in the older population.
Peter May, a research assistant professor at TILDA and Trinity College, said they narrowed down dozens and dozens of factors to include gender, ability to walk, lift weights, disease diagnoses and age.
“From an Irish point of view, it is important to have such an index for the first time,” he said, adding that an equivalent US mortality predictor has been widely used in research and clinical practice.
The Trinity College researchers used data from 8,174 nationally representative people over the age of 50 who completed the first wave of the Irish Longitudinal Study of Aging in 2009 and 2010.
Within four years of enrollment, 5.5% or 448 participants had died, and the researchers looked at 67 predictors thought to be associated with mortality over time.
They found that being male reduced the odds of mortality and that men over the age of 50 were one and a half times more likely to die than their female counterparts in the next four years. People with a cancer diagnosis were 3.3 times more likely to die, while people who had had a heart attack were 1.8 times more likely to die within the time period.
Dr. May, one of the study’s authors, said this does not mean that cancer is more deadly than a heart attack.
“Fortunately, most people who are diagnosed with cancer will live for months and years,” he said.
He looked at the people in the study, which was just published in the BMC Geriatrics diary, he had already survived a heart attack.
“By definition, we’re talking about people who have had a heart attack and they didn’t die instantly, and heart attacks are something that obviously kills people instantly in a way that cancer doesn’t,” said Dr. . May. .
“It does not reflect the relative lethality of those two conditions. We know that cardiovascular diseases and cancer are closely related to the cause of death. [figures] nationally year after year.
The researchers found that those who smoked after age 30 were 2.2 times more likely to die within four years, while those who had difficulty lifting 10 pounds were 1.6 times more likely to die.
Mobility was also an important factor: those who had difficulty walking 100 meters were considered 2.1 times more likely to die in the time period, while those who reported difficulty using the toilet were 3.2 times more likely to die. mortality in the period.
Dr May said the model showed the importance of maintaining mobility later in life.
“Exercising regularly, increasing your heart rate in old age always shows up on TILDA as being associated with good outcomes, and if you’re not mobile, that’s associated with worse outcomes,” he said.
“Smoking cessation and exercise, which means moving around, but also lifting and other types of stretching and strengthening, have been shown to be very good at reinforcing protective strategies.”
He said the model controls the diagnosis of several serious conditions. “Lack of mobility further increases your risk.”
When it came to well-being, people who self-reported their physical health as ‘poor’ were 1.7 times more likely to die in the next four years, while people who had more than one emergency room or hospitalization in the last year were also 1.7 times higher risk of mortality.
Age was the biggest factor, with people over the age of 85 nearly 24 times more likely to die than people under the age of 65 in the next four years.
People between the ages of 70 and 74 were 4.7 times more likely to die in the next four years than people under 65.
Dr May said they were surprised to find that daily alcohol consumption was not one of the independent predictors of mortality.
He also said that the Irish data was very similar to the data discovered in the US “Internationally, we were very surprised how little difference there was with other countries.
“There is being a man and age, which are things that are not under our control on a day-to-day basis, but there are other things like being active regularly, avoiding risky behaviors like smoking, those are the deciding factors everywhere as far as we know. ”
He said it was important that we get better at identifying people at high risk of mortality.
“These are all variables that are routinely collected. They’re in people’s files or else it’s very easy to collect them with a simple question. There is no need to take blood from people or do complicated tests. People who score very high on this index have a markedly increased risk of mortality in the near future,” said Dr. May.
It was important to “use this and other tools to identify in advance who could benefit from more supportive care, more care planning, not necessarily end-of-life care as such, but preparation for the increased risk of mortality, the need for more supportive care and the need to exercise when possible.”
