Is a man's facial appearance predictive of how he will die?

The ability of a range of health professionals including an oncologist, a h aematologist, a cardiologist, a general practitioner and a counsellor to pr edict the cause of death from facial appearance has been evaluated. Each pa rticipant was asked to predict the cause of death from facial photographs o f 200 caucasian male doctors whose cause of death was known to be due to ei ther arterial disease or neoplasia. Statistically significant concordance w as found between the oncologist and both the GP and the counsellor in their predictions of cause of death, although the individual accuracy was no gre ater than would be expected by chance. This suggests that common judgements based on facial appearances may be shared among certain health professiona ls.