5 ms·

I've never really understood what life time risk means... Does 50% mean I'll get a heart attack in my 40s, or mean I'll get one in my 80s instead of getting ca

by fleitz 12y ago

I've never really understood what life time risk means... Does 50% mean I'll get a heart attack in my 40s, or mean I'll get one in my 80s instead of getting cancer, etc. What I'm getting at is that if nothing else kills you, eventually your heart will fail. Shouldn't it be possible to decrease my heart attack risk by increasing my cancer risk?

brandonb 12y ago
These models often compensate for competing risks of death—if you're curious, look up "Cox proportional hazard" to understand some of the math behind this. Your meta point is a good one—I would like to see a model that predicts either your total lifespan, or probability of living to (say) 80 years of age heart attack-free. Perhaps I'll try to get access to the raw Framingham data and build a model to do that. (For this particular page, I just bootstrapped from the existing medical research, which, while it has its limitations, has at least been thoroughly studied.)