Don’t Miss the Living to 100 Research Symposium
By Cynthia Edwalds
Expanding Horizons, April 2022
Mark your calendar! The eighth triennial Living to 100 Research Symposium will be held January 15–18, 2023, in Orlando, FL. It has been my pleasure and honor to be involved on the planning committee and as a discussant of papers presented since the very first such symposium in 2002. While most of the attendees at past Living to 100 symposia have been actuaries, academic researchers and practicing professionals from other disciplines have also attended.
Topics covered at these meetings have included the biology of aging; estimating mortality and mortality improvement at advanced ages; predictors of longevity; advances in medicine with the potential to extend life span; financial and non-financial aspects of retirement; and implications of increasing longevity on society, social insurance programs, the insurance industry and public policy.
One session that has been on the agenda for several of the symposia comprised a panel of the chief actuaries of the social security programs in the US, the UK and Canada. They shared the recent mortality experience of their respective programs and discussed their estimates of future mortality improvement. It has been very informative to see the evolution of thinking over the past two decades as emerging experience shifted from being uniformly better than projected to slightly worse than projected.
Keynote speakers at previous Living to 100 events have provided some of the most eye-opening content. One of the most memorable for me was the keynote talk Dr. Anthony Atala gave in 2014 about the research effort he is leading at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, showing videos of human organs being printed using special three-dimensional printers and of recipients of these printed organs functioning normally post-surgery.
At the most recent symposium in 2020, Dr. Steve Horvath gave a keynote talk about measuring the methylation of DNA in the cells in a human body as an epigenetic clock to estimate the biological age of the person. His studies showed that relative mortality risk in the 5 percent of people of a given age whose DNA had the least methylation was half that of people of the same age with average DNA methylation. In turn, the relative mortality risk of people of a given age with average DNA methylation was half that of the 5 percent of people of the same age whose DNA had the most methylation. This epigenetic clock can be used to study the effects of interventions designed to slow or reverse aging.
At each symposium I have been interested in the research papers on measuring and projecting mortality and mortality improvement. At the 2020 meeting I discussed a paper by Zhiping Huang et al, “The Application of Affine Processes in Cohort Mortality Risk Models,” and a paper by Nahn Huynh with Michael Ludkovski, “Multi-Population Longevity Models: A Spatial Random Field Approach.” Dr. Huang’s paper presented a technique for jointly modeling stochastic mortality and interest to improve estimates of pension and annuity obligations. Dr. Huynh’s paper presented a technique for jointly modeling mortality and mortality improvement in distinct but related populations, such as males and females, while retaining the unique characteristics of each population
I have learned something new and surprising at each of the past Living to 100 Research Symposia, and I have included material from Living to 100 in my lectures on longevity risk and social insurance. While the full program for the 2023 symposium has not yet been finalized, I am confident that the keynote speakers, research papers and panels will provide excellent content that will be both intellectually stimulating and useful. I hope to see you there in January 2023!
Cynthia Edwalds, FSA, ACAS, MAAA, has retired as clinical professor of finance at DePaul University and executive director of the Fred Arditti Center for Risk Management. Cynthia can be contacted at cynthia.edwalds.fsa@gmail.com.