Utility of Hippocrates' prognostic aphorism to predict death in the modern era: prospective cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To determine if one of Hippocrates' aphorisms, identifying good cognition and good appetite as two prognostic factors, predicts death in community living older adults in the modern era. DESIGN: Secondary analysis of an existing population based cohort study. SETTING: Manitoba Study of Health and Aging. PARTICIPANTS: 1751 community living adults aged more than 65 enrolled in the Manitoba Study of Health and Aging in 1991 and followed over five years. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Time to death. METHODS: We recreated the hippocratic prognosticator using an item that measures appetite drawn from the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-depression subscale, and the mini-mental state examination, with a score of >25 being considered as normal. People with normal cognition and appetite were compared with those with either poor cognition or poor appetite. We constructed Cox regression models, adjusted for age, sex, education, and functional status. RESULTS: The prognostic aphorism predicted death, with an unadjusted hazard ratio of 2.37 (95% confidence interval 1.93 to 2.88) and a hazard ratio of 1.71 (1.37 to 2.12) adjusted for age, sex, and education. Both poor appetite and poor cognition predicted death. The sensitivity and specificity were not, however, sufficient for the measure to be used alone. CONCLUSION: An aphorism devised by Hippocrates millennia ago can predict death in the modern era.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".