The online test that predicts if you’ll die in the next five years

SCIENTISTS have developed a five-minute online test which they claim can accurately determine someone’s chance of surviving the next five years.

Answering just 11 questions for women, or 13 for men, is enough to determine your mortality with an 80 per cent accuracy, the researchers say.

The website – which was launched this morning at www.ubble.co.uk – is free and designed for people living in the UK aged between 40 and 70.

The questions involve lifestyle, family structure and broad medical history, but weight, diet and drinking are not mentioned – and the researchers say the most powerful question is simply ‘how healthy do you feel?’.

The scientists claim that their research, published today in the

A number of surprising factors

Lancet medical journal, is the most accurate indicator of five-year mortality ever created.

The questions are slightly different for men and women, reflecting the varying factors that influence the health of the two genders.

After answering the questions, each person is given a percentage chance of dying for the next five years, as well as an ‘Ubble age’ – the age at which they would be expected, on average, to have this five-year death risk. If someone’s Ubble age is above their real age, they should take action by changing their lifestyle, according to the authors.

The test was based on data from 500,000 British volunteers in the UK Biobank study, who were each tracked over nearly five years and assessed according to 655 health and demographic measurements.

The scientists then used complex algorithms to determine which of the measurements were most closely linked to the participants’ mortality.

The research revealed a number of surprising factors in that can contribute to life expectancy. Selfreported walking pace, for example, is a stronger predictor of death risk than smoking habits.

And questions about how many cars a family owns is a strong indicator of their wealth – itself strongly linked to life expectancy.

Study leader Professor Erik Ingelsson, from Uppsala University, Sweden, said asking a series of simple questions is a better predictor of mortality than biological measurements such as blood pressure. ‘

You probably know yourself the best,’ he said. ‘Just answering how you feel combines a lot of different aspects – if you have been ill, how fit you are, how healthily you are eating. That is why it is so predictive.’