Predicting 10-Year Mortality for Older Adults

TO THE EDITOR: Preventive interventions such as cancer screening exposes patients to immediate risks with delayed benefits, suggesting that risks outweigh the benefits in patients with limited life expectancy. Guidelines now recommend considering the likelihood of long-term survival when evaluating whether preventive interventions with long lagtimes-to-benefit (such as CRC screening and intensive glycemic control) are more likely to help or harm an individual patient.1, 2 However, most mortality indices have focused on short-term mortality risk (≤5 years).3, 4 To help clinicians identify patients who are at low risk for 10-year mortality and thus most likely to benefit from these preventive interventions, we examined whether our previously developed 4-year mortality index5 accurately predicted 10-year mortality.