Life Expectancy and the Life Care Planner

Many of the costs budgeted in a life care plan are “per year,” and the more years of life expected the greater the cost. Thus the life expectancy is a significant factor in the total cost of the plan. For this reason, life care planners are often asked what is the patient’s life expectancy.1 Even if the life care planner will not provide a professional opinion on this issue, having a basic knowledge of the subject area, if offered only for preliminary or informal purposes, is valuable to both the planner and the client. There is a medical literature on the life expectancy of patients with various conditions, and in particular of those with neurological impairment such as cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, or spinal cord injury. In the present article we focus on these three conditions. As would be expected, the more severe the injury, as measured by the degree of disabilities, the greater the reduction from normal life expectancy. In this article we offer a brief guide to this literature. We begin here with the basics. We then discuss the risk factors associated with survival. We follow with a discussion of the extant literature. We give examples for many medical conditions, to demonstrate that the framework described here is universally applicable.