Project Description

The aims of our research are to identify and quantify the key factors affecting mortality and longevity, such as

• lifestyle choices, medical conditions and/or interventions; 
• modelling of temporal changes in the factors affecting morbidity and mortality;
• evaluation of plausible scenarios in mortality trends of insureds due to medical advances or lifestyle changes;
• and development of software tools to forecast longevity risk.

The top causes of premature death in England are: heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease, cancer and (from recently) Alzheimer’s disease.  Important health interventions and social developments include widening of statins prescription, possible changes in blood pressure targets, rise in obesity and type 2 diabetes, reduction in smoking, trends in diet and physical activity according to socioeconomic status.

We have identified a target list of conditions and/or interventions. The target list of conditions are myocardial infarction, stroke and type 2 diabetes. The target list of interventions are statin prescription, intensive blood-pressure lowering and hormone replacement therapy.

We are using the subset of the THIN primary care database comprising 3.5 million patients born before 1960 for this research project. This is the first time that such a comprehensive dataset is used for actuarial research into longevity. The THIN data is available commercially through IMS Health,  http://www.csdmruk.imshealth.com/our-data/accessing-the-data.shtml.