By Lindsey Tanner 
AP

Want to know your chances of dying in the next 10 years? Here are some bad signs: getting winded walking several blocks, smoking, and having trouble pushing a chair across the room.

That's according to a "mortality index" developed by San Francisco researchers for people older than 50.

The test scores may satisfy people's morbid curiosity, but the researchers say their 12-item index is mostly for use by doctors. It can help them decide whether costly health screenings or medical procedures are worth the risk for patients unlikely to live 10 more years.

It's best to take the test with a doctor, who can discuss what the score means in the context of patients' own medical history, the study authors say.

The index "wasn't meant as guidance about how to alter your lifestyle," said lead author Dr. Marisa Cruz of the University of California, San Francisco.

Instead, doctors can use the results to help patients understand the pros and cons of such things as rigorous diabetes treatment, colon cancer screening and tests for cervical cancer. Those may not be safe or appropriate for very sick, old people likely to die before cancer ever develops.

The 12 items on the index are assigned points; fewer total points means better odds.

• Men automatically get 2 points. In addition to that, men and women ages 60 to 64 get 1 point; ages 70 to 74 get 3 points; and 85 or over get 7 points. 
• Two points each: a current or previous cancer diagnosis, excluding minor skin cancers; lung disease limiting activity or requiring oxygen; heart failure; smoking; difficulty bathing; difficulty managing money because of health or memory problem; difficulty walking several blocks. 
• One point each: diabetes or high blood sugar; difficulty pushing large objects, such as a heavy chair; being thin or normal weight. 

The highest, or worst, score is a 26, with a 95 percent chance of dying within 10 years. To get that, you'd have to be a man at least 85 years old with all the above conditions.

For a score of zero, which means a 3 percent chance of dying within 10 years, you'd have to be a woman younger than 60 without any of those infirmities — but at least slightly overweight.

It's hardly surprising that a sick, older person would have a much higher chance of dying than someone younger and more vigorous, and it's well known that women generally live longer than men. But why would being overweight be less risky than being of normal weight or slim?

One possible reason is that thinness in older age could be a sign of illness, Cruz said.

Other factors could also play a role, so the index should be seen as providing clues but not the gospel truth, the research suggests.

The findings were published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Grants from the National Institute on Aging and the American Federation for Aging Research helped pay for the study.

The researchers created the index by analyzing data on almost 20,000 Americans over 50 who took part in a national health survey in 1998. They tracked the participants for 10 years. Nearly 6,000 participants died during that time.

They previously used the test to predict the risk of dying within four years. They said their new effort shows the same index can be used to predict 10-year mortality.

Dr. Stephan Fihn, a University of Washington professor of medicine and health quality measurement specialist with Veterans Affairs health services in Seattle, said the index seems valid and "methodologically sound."

But he said it probably would be most accurate for the oldest patients, who don't need a scientific crystal ball to figure out their days are numbered. 

Hurricane Sandy is already stressing millions of people living on the eastern seaboard, but it’s not likely to kill anywhere near the number of people who would have died in such a storm 100 years ago. That’s because weather and emergency officials can get people out of the worst flood zones in time.

So what are the most likely 21^st century causes of death? Carbon monoxide poisoning often leads the list, as people turn to grills and gas stoves in power outages. Flash flooding and storm surges are also big killers.

Each hurricane is different and while a large percentage of deaths are from drowning, it’s not necessarily always the main cause. Heart attacks can also kill people, especially the elderly.

Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, was the deadliest hurricane this century. Officials tried to evacuate residents in low-lying areas, but several hundred people died in Louisiana when levees failed and floodwaters poured in, quickly and silently, as people slept.

Louisiana’s chief health official, Dr. Raoult Ratard, and colleagues counted 971 deaths in Louisiana alone that could be directly blamed on Katrina. Forty percent had drowned, 25 percent of people died from injuries including carbon monoxide poisoning and 11 percent died from heart conditions, which may have been exacerbated by stress or lack of access to medical care. Nearly, half, 49 percent, of the victims were aged 75 or older – showing how the frail are often most at risk.

Carbon monoxide poisoning – usually listed under injuries – killed 10 people in Alabama and Texas after Katrina and a second hurricane, Rita, hit and power went out, often for weeks.

“Few homes had functioning carbon monoxide detectors,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health officials wrote in a report published afterwards. “CDC continues to recommend that generators be placed far from homes, away from window air conditioners,  and that carbon monoxide detectors be used by all households operating gasoline-powered appliances (e.g., generators and gas furnaces), with batteries replaced yearly.”

Watch now: Multiple live video streams of Sandy coverage

Carbon monoxide is an odorless gas generated when natural gas, gasoline, coal and other fuels are burned. Victims usually don’t notice they are being affected and they can die in their sleep. The first symptom is often sleepiness or nausea, as well as headache.

It can be a problem any time of year but especially during power outages as people turn to other sources to cook and to heat or cool their homes. “Don't run a car or truck inside a garage attached to your house, even if you leave the door open. Don't heat your house with a gas oven,” CDC cautions.

In 2008, Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast near Galveston, killing 74 people in Texas and Louisiana. The largest percentage were people who died from carbon monoxide poisoning after the storm had passed and left 2.3 million people without power – 13 people died this way, state health offiicials reported. Eight people drowned and 12 died of heart attacks, strokes and other heart-related causes.

Anthony Arguez and James Elsner of Florida State University analyzed hurricane deaths and found that, even though more people live along the coasts, they are far less likely to die in hurricanes than in the days before highways and warning systems made it easy to escape the most dangerous areas.

In the past 100 years or so, they found, hurricanes have killed about 15,000 people – about half of them in 1900 when Galveston, Texas was destroyed by a hurricane. The storm surge – created when winds blow seawater up onto coastal areas -- was the biggest killer. Storm surges have been among Sandy's first effects on New York, New Jersey and Delaware.

“At least 1,500 persons lost their lives during Katrina and many of those deaths occurred directly, or indirectly, as a result of storm surge,” the National Hurricane Center says on its website.

Flash floods can also be a risk – not so much to people in homes, but to those out and about on foot and in cars. Even six inches of fast-moving water and pull a person down if they’re wading in it, and cars can be pulled into rivers or streams.

Live blog: Updates on Hurricane Sandy

When Hurricane Floyd hit North Carolina in 1999, dropping 20 inches of rain, most of those who died drowned when they were trapped in cars trying to navigate floodwaters, state health officials reported. Of the 52 people who died during and directly after Floyd, 24 died in cars, and seven, including five rescue workers, died trying to escape floodwaters by boat.

While people may worry about infectious diseases after hurricanes cause floods, they haven't historically been a major cause of death or illness. Health officials also issue detailed warnings about food poisoning -- a danger when power outages knock out refrigerators. But statistics don't indicate many deaths from foodborne illness after U.S. hurricanes.

Related news:

What food to save, throw out if you lose power

It's a wash for West Nile virus after Hurricane Isaac

Why people stay behind during hurricanes

Trish Hamilton / FeaturePics.com

Men who drank six cups of coffee or more a day had a 10 percent lower risk of dying; for women, it was 15 percent lower, according to a large new study.

Coffee drinkers who worry about the jolt of java it takes to get them going in the morning might just as well relax and pour another cup.

That’s according to the largest-ever analysis of the link between coffee consumption and mortality, which suggests that latte lovers had a lower risk of death during the study period.

“I would say it offers some reassurance to coffee drinkers,” said Neal Freedman, a nutritional epidemiology researcher at the National Cancer Institute. “Other studies have suggested a higher risk of mortality with coffee drinking and we didn’t see that in our study.”

In fact, men who drank at least six cups of coffee a day had a 10 percent lower chance of dying during the 14-year study period than those who drank none. For women, the risk was 15 percent lower, according to Freedman’s work, published in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Reassuring, indeed, for hard-core coffee drinkers like Spencer Turer, who guzzles four to six cups of coffee every day for personal consumption -- and sips between 75 and 300 cups more as part of his job as a professional coffee taster. 

“It’s good news for all coffee drinkers because we can feel really good about the decisions we’re making,” said Turer, director of coffee operations for the firm Coffee Analysts, which provides unbiased scientific review of coffee products. “People concerned about the health effects may choose to drink more coffee.”

Overall, in the U.S. about 64 percent of adults drink coffee daily, according to Joe DeRupo, spokesman for the National Coffee Association. At 3.2 cups a piece, that amounts to some 479 million cups a day, agency figures indicate. 

Those coffee fans can take the new results seriously. The mortality reduction is modest but solid, said Freedman, whose study offered the size and power to document associations other researchers had only suspected.  

He and his team in NIC’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics reviewed the coffee habits of more than 402,000 people followed between 1995 and 2008, including more than 52,000 who died.

They included some 229,000 men and more than 173,000 women ages 50 to 71 who agreed to take part in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, which tracked comprehensive lifestyle questionnaires filled out by people in six states and two metropolitan areas.

Freedman’s analysis centered on healthy people; those with cancer, heart disease and stroke were excluded from the review. 

“We didn’t know what to expect,” recalled Freedman. “There have been a lot of studies and the results have been mixed.”

Previous studies suggested that coffee might contribute to heart disease; others found similar results to Freedman’s, that coffee actually cut the risk of death. Initially, even Freedman’s study indicated a higher risk of death among coffee drinkers, but only because so many of them smoked cigarettes, too.

“It was only after we took into account people’s smoking that the association, the inverse association, revealed itself,” he said. “Smoking has a really strong association with death.”

Drinking six or more cups of coffee a day cut mortality risk the most, but not by much. People who drank between two and five cups of coffee daily also appeared to have lower risk, the study showed. Whether the coffee contained caffeine or not didn't seem to matter. 

It's not clear whether -- or where -- the mortality effect tops out, but Freedman wasn't advising anyone to gulp 12 cups a day to test the theory. 

The link to lower mortality held up whether researchers considered total deaths or deaths from specific diseases and other causes – except for cancer. When it came to cancer, deaths were slightly higher among male coffee drinkers.

Why? “We don’t know,” Freedman said.

The researchers also couldn’t say whether the lower risk of death could be because sick people and those with chronic diseases don’t tend to drink coffee.

Freedman is quick to emphasize that his study is an observational study, so it can note apparent ties between coffee drinking and decreased risk of death, but it can’t say whether coffee is the cause. 

It might not even be the coffee itself that engenders the effect. Perhaps there's something about the act of making, serving or drinking coffee that protects people from death. It may be a soothing ritual, for instance, or it could engender more social contact, acts associated with lower risk of death.

Of course, there could be something beneficial about the drink itself, antioxidants, perhaps, or other elements that experts haven't detected yet. 

"Coffee has more than 1,000 compounds and we really don't know what effects those compounds have on health," he said. 

The study will be cheered as excellent news by coffee drinkers, especially healthy people and those in the six-cups-a-day crowd. But Freedman urges others to check with their doctors and use common sense.

“I don’t want people to read this and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to drink more coffee because I don’t want to die,’” he said. “We just don’t know whether it’s cause or effect.”

Related Vitals stories: 

• Nursing moms' caffeine intake doesn't wake babies
• Latte decay: Slow sipping may boost cavities in adults
• Three cups a day to keep skin cancer away?
• VIDEO: Fight depression with coffee and exercise

By MyHealthNewsDaily Staff

Women with heart failure, a condition in which the heart fails to pump enough blood to meet the body's demands, may live longer than their male counterparts, a new study says.

The results are based on an analysis of 31 studies involving 28,000 men and 14,000 women with long-term (chronic) heart failure who were followed for three years.

After taking into account patients' age, men had a 31 percent higher risk of dying over the study compared with women, the researchers said.

However, the absolute difference between men and women's mortality was only slight. Over the three year period, 25.3 percent of the women and 25.7 percent of the men died.

The study is the largest to look at how gender affects risk of death for people with heart failure.

A number of factors could explain the survival advantage in women, said study researcher Manuel Martinez-Selles, of the Gregorio Marañón University Hospital in Madrid. "The female heart appears to respond to injury differently from the male heart," Martinez-Selles said.

For example, women appear to have less detrimental changes in heart function after an injury, and greater protection from irregular heartbeats, Martinez-Selles said.

The study also found that overall women were prescribed fewer recommended treatments for heart failure than men, including angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) and beta blockers.

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