They're both supposed to be in good health though, we have Biden's public yearly checkup report. I don't think many old people get scans and full-body checkups every year and then die of something catastrophic with no warning?
I wonder if he does CT/MRI/angiograms to find any vascular abnormalities. Seems to be a big cause of sudden death, but they don't talk about it. One CT for a 70-year-old head of state doesn't sound like too much?
Still, their actuarial chance of dying within a year is >5%, given their age and sex.
Even with scans and checkups, at that age, a bad case of the flu can kill you, or start you on that path. And I don't think we have any reliable non-invasive ways of detecting heart attack risk, or aneurism risk, those kinds of things.
Not sure, but don't ECGs find cases of severe plaques or narrowed arteries? Or most cases of heart disease.
> aneurism risk
An angiography should find most cases, from some quick research. "The CTA sensitivity, specificity and accuracy was 80%, 43% and 73%, respectively. The CTA sensitivity for aneurysms < 3 mm and 3 mm – 5 mm in size was 30% and 81.5%, respectively (p = 0.024)." [1]
My priors would go the opposite way: a full-body checkup cannot clear out the plaque in my arteries, lower my blood pressure, strength my vascular walls, and there's no miracle drugs that definitively address those. I think of a checkup that says "good to go, won't die in the next year!" is more like an auto checkup, where we do diagnostics then can take definitive action.
That being said saying odds are one of them dies before the election is uncomfortably high isn't something I'd subscribe to. Quick check here, using N=age-google-told-me and N+1, gets 1 in 18 and 1 in 13, 6% and 8%. If they were 60 it'd be 1%, 70, 2%.
Actuarial tables tell you basically nothing about a specific individual. For that you would want to look at some personal. Like, say, a full body checkup.
Yeah thats a good point, I agree, a full body checkup tells us stuff about an individual, but it doesn't heal them (or at length: meaningfully rule out, or affect, odds of dying in the next year)
Apparently [1], Biden at least has "controlled" cholesterol, a normal EKG, some asymptomatic and controlled fibrillation. The number of experts who consult the guy every year is actually impressive.
The usual 70-year-old is probably a risky bet, but surely 10 specialists plus a team of generalists would make a more predictive yearly checkup. I think he's going to lose through normal politics and not by way of a heart attack.
