A number of factors influence a doctor’s clinical decision-making process in terms of treatment and prognosis of the patient. One of the most valuable pieces of information that can aid with this is the estimated life expectancy of their patients. This not only affects how the doctor chooses to carry out the patient’s treatment, but also the advice that he/she would give as to what the best options are. In a clinical setting, for example, a doctor may think that an older patient with a better than average life expectancy may more likely benefit from cancer screening as screening can potentially be more damaging than helpful to some patients. Additionally, patients may want to know their likelihood of surviving to be able to plan out future goals.
The Lee Index was developed in the U.S. to aid doctors in estimating probabilities of patients’ life expectancies. It uses twelve factors including age, sex, existing medical conditions and ability to carry out day-to-day tasks to assess the risk of four year mortality in older adults. Using 904 older community-dwelling adults from GP practices in the greater Dublin area, this project will seek to validate the use of the Lee Index in contexts outside the U.S. Assessing the performance of the Lee Index in another setting will help us to judge if the Lee Index could be a useful tool for predicting mortality among older patients in primary care in Ireland. This may have greater implications on how we treat and inform patients.
