Issue 12 of the Longevity Bulletin explores the topic of pharmacology from a number of different perspectives and examines:
- whether the prescribing of too many medications is actually having a detrimental effect on health, and why the current system encourages over-prescribing
- the growth of epidemiology as a research area since the 1950s, looking at how it moved away from the medical field into academia, and why results from medical trials may not always be as robust as imagined
- the opioid epidemic in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the steps being taken to try to mitigate it
- the role of pharmacology in the treatment of diabetes and high cholesterol, and whether the statins used to treat high cholesterol have played a part in the increasing incidence of diabetes.
As well as these, you can read updates and news from the Continuing Mortality Investigation (CMI) and the IFoA.
Our contributors to this issue are drawn from a range of fields within academia, medicine and statistical modelling, and each bring a thought-provoking and expert perspective to the topic under investigation.
Share your thoughts on the bulletin
We welcome your feedback on this latest edition of the Longevity Bulletin, and are always open to suggestions for possible future topics. The IFoA’s Mortality Research Steering Committee is also keen to ensure that the IFoA’s mortality, longevity and morbidity research agenda is addressing relevant issues.
Please take the opportunity to share your thoughts by completing a short survey – it should take no more than a couple of minutes to complete.
Contact Details
For more information about the Longevity Bulletin or to subscribe please contact the Research and Knowledge Team.
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Events calendar
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Climate Solvency The Actuaries Carbon Collaboration: Applying Actuarial Concepts to Carbon Emissions
6 July 2022The Actuaries’ Carbon Collaboration (ACC) is a group of actuaries and other professionals working towards a coherent understanding of the issues around greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by considering them in an actuarial context.
Emissions into and absorption from the atmosphere can be modelled in the same way that we model variable cash flows, including the impacts of uncertain quantities and timing. The ACC’s work investigates both the insights that this analogy provides and its limitations.
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Sessional Meeting: Data and Modelling Considerations for mental health in life insurance
11 July 2022This talk presents the work of the Data and Modelling workstream of the IFoA Mental Health Working Party. We explore data and modelling considerations in the risk assessment and underwriting of mental health conditions. We will also consider how newer risk factors and improved data availability might open up opportunities for additional underwriting and product designs.
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Pensions Dashboards
12 July 2022As the industry prepares for Pensions Dashboards, we have lined up a specialist panel who is at the heart of the ongoing work in this area. Hear the latest developments, future proposals and have the opportunity to put forward your questions to our speakers.
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Crisis Management and Boards
18 July 2022Crisis management, the process by which an organization deals with a disruptive, sudden and unexpected event that threatens to harm the organization or its stakeholders, has become a key concern in the light of the Pandemic and Geopolitical risks.
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Applying AI – From Concept to Practice
19 July 2022Artificial Intelligence is heralded as a game-changer to the ways industries use data, with the insurance industry especially looking to embrace these new technologies. This brings many questions – not least around data privacy, ethics, potential biases and so on – with regulators increasingly interested in developments.
Moreover, whilst the stunning progress of specific technologies such as Watson and Alphazero made headlines some years ago, current commercial applications of AI remain far from mature.
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This webinar will cover:
• Some background on the risks of misselling in an ESG context, including the DWS case
• Achieving positive impact is a strong antidote to the risks of greenwashing or ESG misselling, however this risks having a tension with fiduciary responsibilities
• This tension can be resolved with a concept called Universal Ownership
• Under Universal ownership, investors have an appetite to make a loss in order to achieve positive impact, and yet still have no compromise on their fiduciary responsibilities
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This session will focus on the transformation roadmap of the healthcare sector in KSA and the role of actuarial capabilities in enhancing its evolution to the desired end stage as per the objectives of the Vision 2030. The discussion will focus how the system has evolved so far and shed light on the expected future changes. Through examining the transformation, we will highlight how the sector is and can use actuarial expertise to not only assist with this transformation but also use basic actuarial principles to identify the key risks and their respective mitigation strategies.
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Sessional Meeting: Covid-19 and the Effectiveness of ERM Frameworks
Online15 August 2022The purpose of this research paper is to explore enterprise risk management lessons which can be learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic in preparation for potential future pandemics as well as other “gray rhino” or “black swan” events. This paper is not intended to be an all-encompassing solution to the issues presented by Covid-19; rather, the content has been provided to help drive discussions regarding how risk management processes may need to evolve in line with the dynamic nature of the underlying risks that they sometimes need to capture.
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The IFoA's Infrastructure Working Party, led by Chris Lewin, will present its new introductory guide to infrastructure investment, which will be published on the IFoA web-site prior to the webinar. Those readers whose institutions have already taken the plunge into infrastructure will know that it is a highly complex and diverse field of activity. This guide does not explore all the matters which investors take into account, but it does discuss many of the more important points, including the risks and past returns, benchmarking, and ESG and SDG considerations. Attendees will be invi
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Health – Our Greatest Asset
2 November 2022Health contributes to happiness at the personal, family, community and societal level. Health, importantly underpins all our economic security. This talk will explore the drivers of our health, the measurement of health and the steps we can take to improve health – most of which lie outside the NHS.