ABSTRACT
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 781 Survival Rate Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 782 Mobility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 783 Mental Retardation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 784 Other Significant Medical Illnesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 784 Epilepsy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 784 Feeding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 784 Tracheostomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 785 More Intense Medical and Nursing Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 785 Uniform High-Quality Medical Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 786 Access to Acute Medical Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 786 Comparison of Survival Rates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 786 Comparison of Survival Rates: California Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 787 Methodological Difficulties in the California Database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 789 Comparison of the California Data to Other Studies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 791 Response to 2004 Analysis by Strauss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 791 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 793 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 794
The term
life expectancy
is frequently misunderstood. When a determination of life expectancy is made, it is not a precise prediction of how long a person will live; rather, it is a statistical average of future life spans. For example, the current life expectancy of women in the United States is 79 years. That does not mean that
all women will live to 79 years of age; rather, it means that the average life span for all women is 79 years. Out of 100 healthy 20-year-old women identified today, approximately 50 will have died and 50 will still be living 59 years from now. That means some may have died in their 20s, 30s, etc., and some will live into their 80s and beyond. The term
life
expectancy
always refers to an average life span expectation for a group of individuals and can never be an exact prediction of an individual’s life span.
