On February 18, 2025, a working paper co-authored by the lead researchers from the SCOR Foundation research project “Estimating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on breast cancer” was published online in the Annals of Actuarial Science (Cambridge University Press), under the title “Cancer insurance pricing under different scenarios associated with diagnosis and treatment”. 

Working Paper Abstract

We consider pricing of a specialised critical illness and life insurance contract for breast cancer (BC) risk. We compare (a) an industry-based Markov model with (b) a recently developed semi-Markov model, which accounts for unobserved BC cases and progression through clinical stages of BC, and (c) an alternative Markov model derived from (b). All models are calibrated using population data in England and data from the medical literature. We show that the semi-Markov model aligns best with empirical evidence. We then consider net premiums of specialized life insurance products under various scenarios of cancer diagnosis and treatment. The results show strong dependence on the time spent with diagnosed or undiagnosed pre-metastatic BC. This proves to be significant for refining cancer survival estimates and accurately estimating related age dependence by cancer stage. In contrast, the industry-based model, by overlooking this critical factor, is more sensitive to the model assumptions, underscoring its limitations in cancer estimates.

The “Estimating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on breast cancer” research project ran from 2022 to 2024 and was led by Heriot-Watt University. It was primarily managed by Research Fellow Arık Ayşe, with support from Professor of Statistics George Streftaris, both of the Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics, Heriot-Watt University, and the Maxwell Institute for Mathematical Sciences, UK).

The project was associated with ongoing research focusing on results dissemination, knowledge exchange, and conference presentations.

Go to the project page