Predicting Lifespan in Heart Failure

People with heart failure tend to overestimate how long they will live, a study suggests. Heart doctors at Duke University used a new tool to predict how long 122 patients were likely to live. Then they told the patients what the tool predicted. The average patient was told to expect about 10 more years. But nearly 2 out of 3 people disagreed. They predicted they would live 13 years or more. In the next few years, the patients tended to die at the rate doctors predicted. HealthDay News wrote about the study June 3. It appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.