The biennial European Population Conference (EPC), held at the University of St Andrews in Edinburgh, Scotland, is the largest and most important scientific meeting of European demographers. Mortality and morbidity research is one of the central topics at EPC, accounting for at least 30% of all accepted submissions.

This year, the University of Southern Denmark’s Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics (CPop) contributed to four EPC sessions through the SCOR Chair on Mortality Research:

1. PhD student Elizaveta Ukolova presented “Cause-of-Death Dependencies: Structure, Evolution by Age and Sensitivity to Disruptions” (co-authored by Trifon I. Missov) in “Session 29: Flash session Morbidity”.
    
2. Associate Professor Trifon I. Missov presented “A Three-Component Model for Adult Mortality” in “Session 74: Mortality Modelling”. 
    
3. Associate Professor Silvia Rizzi’s work (with co-authors) on “Smoothing trends and seasonality in short-term mortality forecasting” was presented in “Session 96: Modelling and Forecasting Mortality”. 
    
4. The work of Postdoc Cosmo Strozza and Associate Professor Silvia Rizzi (with a co-author) on the “Risk of Death of Individuals with Different Comorbidity Profiles during the Covid-19 Pandemic” was presented in “Session 100: Excess Mortality and Life Expectancy Changes during the COVID-19 pandemic”.

During these talks, the CPop researchers presented methodological innovations in uncovering cause-of-death dependency structures (Talk 1), modelling dependent competing risks in a mixture model setting (Talk 2), and forecasting baseline seasonal patterns in mortality (Talk 3). In addition, Talk 4 provided estimates of age-specific risks of dying in Denmark prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to different comorbidity profiles. The findings reflect the methodological basis developed by the SCOR Chair on Mortality to address differential survival by comorbidity and multiple-cause-of-death (MCOD) profiles.

The 2024 EPC enabled the CPop participants to establish collaborations with other European researchers to conduct analysis on comorbidities and MCOD, not just for Denmark but also for Spain, France and Sweden, using high-quality individual data.

For more information about the Chair: https://foundation.scor.com/funded-projects/scor-chair-mortality-research