The patient referred to me was male age 21 years. He had epilepsy, controlled by phenobarbital. He died suddenly overnight and vomitus was found on the side of his face.
Some literature does exist that addresses life expectancy in persons with severe disabilities.
We now know more about the problem than just the average age of death for level of abnormality. Functional abilities that related statistically to mortality were degree of ambulation, mobility, toileting skills, eating skills, and tube feeding. Immobile persons could not crawl, creep, or scoot in prone. Persons were unable to feed if they needed to be fed completely by others. If a person had severe or profound mental retardation, was immobile, not toilet trained, and was tube fed, then life expectancy was, on average, only 4 or 5 years more than the current age for those persons between the ages of 1 and 24 years at the start of the study.