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Longevity Bulletin: The pharmacology issue (Issue 12)

We publish this new issue during a pandemic, something not foreseen when we started to commission the articles. But the theme of pharmacology is greatly relevant to our current situation, as the search for a vaccine shows how much we reply on pharmacological research and innovation.

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.
 

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Contact Details

For more information about the Longevity Bulletin or to subscribe please contact the Research and Knowledge Team.

research@actuaries.org.uk

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