SCOR Chair on Mortality Research

With the Chair, we aim to offer a deeper understanding of the morbid conditions leading to death by analyzing multiple causes of death data and patterns, their changes over time, variation across populations, how many years we lived with multiple health conditions and lifespan associated with different type and number of conditions.

As we get older, we become at risk to an increasing number of chronic conditions. Explaining the path leading to death, i.e. from what we die, is then increasingly complex as more and more people are reaching older ages. Previous studies showed that, on average, the mean number of diseases contributing to death is around 3 in recent years. This number tend to increase over time. However, individuals are considered to die from one single cause, i.e. only one cause is considered to have initiated the process leading to death. Focusing on this single cause of death provide a limited picture.  Individuals can have multiple simultaneous health conditions and death often results from the interplay between these multiple conditions. These are referred to as multiple causes of death. 

New research questions, such as those raised within this Chair , require new methods to get answers. So an underlying focus across all research topics will also be to develop, explore or fine tune models to study changes and variation in mortality.

In the past we have seen an almost uninterrupted increase in life expectancy. We can expect that life expectancy will keep increasing, at least in the near future. How to best forecast mortality is still a debated question, but useful as mortality forecasts support many social, health and economic decisions. However, the COVID-19 pandemic is bringing new challenges for forecasters. The COVID-19 pandemic lead to a decrease in life expectancy in many countries in 2020 and 2021.

With the Chair, we aim to evaluate and develop models to forecast mortality and, in particular, how to forecast mortality after a pandemic. Will the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on life expectancy be short or long-term? Will life expectancy bounced back to levels similar to before the pandemic or remain at lower levels for many years?