A first heart attack. Prostate cancer. A 50th birthday. At some point, everyman gets a shocking reminder that he won't be young and healthy forever.

This realization brings up the Big Question: How much time do I have? For agood guess, you could subject yourself to a battery of medical tests, get a fewparts probed, and fill out volumes of questionnaires. But for the most accurateforecast, you should ask the Even Bigger Question: How healthy do I feel?

Think carefully. No matter what all of those tests say, your future largelyhinges on your answer.

The Prophecy Fulfilled

A number of recent studies have uncovered a startling fact: A man's opinionabout his health is one of the most important keys to his longevity.

That's certainly what researchers at Duke University found when they askedalmost 3,000 heart patients to rate their health as poor, fair, good, or verygood. As reported in the December 1999 issue of Medical Care, those whochose "poor" were about three times more likely than those who chose"very good" to die within the next three and a half years. Even ananswer of "good" instead of "very good" increased the risk ofdeath by 70%.

At first, those numbers may not seem particularly shocking. After all, a manwho thinks he's in poor shape is usually right. The astounding thing is that inthis study and many others, researchers did their best to control for age,smoking, activity levels, socioeconomic class, weight, blood pressure,cholesterol, current diseases, and practically everything else that couldaffect a person's survival.

Even with all of these factors removed from the equation, a man's outlook onhis health still stands out as a strong predictor of his survival. (The trend,while found in both men and women, is for unknown reasons significantlystronger in men.) Take a roomful of 55-year-old men with the same lifestylesand identical results from their last checkups, and a single question may tellyou which ones are most likely to see 60.

More Hazardous Than Smoking or Heart Failure

The trend has held up again and again. A review of 19 recent studies,published in the May 1999 issue of Research on Aging, found that apessimistic view of one's health -- regardless of other major risk factors --roughly doubled the chances of dying during study periods, which ranged fromone to 10 years.

In one of those studies, published in the February 25, 1998 issue of theJournal of the American Medical Association, a rating of "poor"in regard to one's health proved to be deadlier than congestive heart failureor smoking 50 or more packs of cigarettes per year.