How fast you walk and how many cars you own are better predictors of whether you will die early than your body fat percentage or blood pressure.
The queries are part of a questionnaire, available at ubble.co.uk, that enables people aged between 40 and 70 to find out how likely they are to die in the next five years, and whether their risk of dying equates to that of someone much older or younger.
“The questionnaire could be important for the general public, to increase their awareness and provide an incentive for healthy lifestyle changes,” says Erik Ingelsson of Uppsala University in Sweden.
The Ubble tool (or UK Longevity Explorer) is based on 655 lifestyle questions answered by people who signed up to the UK Biobank, a database of the DNA and medical histories of 500,000 volunteers, established to tease out links between genetics and lifestyle.
More than 8500 participants died in the five years after they signed up. Ingelsson and Andrea Ganna of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have now used their data to identify 13 questions for men and 11 for women that best predict death in middle age.
For men and women who were disease-free when they signed up to the UK BioBank, smoking was the strongest predictor. For men who weren’t, the strongest predictor was self-reported health; for women, it was a previous cancer diagnosis.
Walking pace – a measure of overall health – also emerged as a strong predictor, with slow walking equating to a higher risk. A sign of lower risk was a greater number of cars in a household: a proxy measure of wealth and the healthier life that often comes with it. Body fat percentage and blood pressure are predictors of early death but their predictive strength is not that much greater than simply looking at how old someone is, so they weren’t deemed necessary to include in the questionnaire.
Ingelsson says that although the questionnaire was based on data from people in the UK, it might apply in other rich countries with similar lifestyle patterns.
Other researchers dispute whether completing the questionnaire will actually help people improve their lifestyles. In a commentary accompanying the Lancet paper, Simon Thompson and Peter Willeit of the University of Cambridge argue that it may instead cause “cyberchondria”.
They point out that although the Swedish researchers identify questions whose answers correlate well with people’s risk of dying, they don’t communicate the actual problems, such as high blood pressure or poor diet, that are behind the raised risk of death. Nor is it helpful, they say, to identify short-term risks of death. It would be better to predict which diseases people may suffer from during the remainder of their lives.
Journal references: The Lancet, DOIs: 10.1016/S01401-6736(15)60578-5 and 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60175-1
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