Comparing strategies for matching mortality forecasts to the most recently observed data: exploring the trade-off between accuracy and robustness.

Background: Given the increased link between retirement age and payments to the development in life expectancy, a precise and regular forecast of life expectancy is of utmost importance. The choice of the jump-off rates, i.e.

The future of smoking-attributable mortality: the case of England & Wales, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Aims: We formally estimate future smoking-attributable mortality up to 2050 for the total national populations of England & Wales, Denmark and the Netherlands, providing an update and extension of the descriptive smoking-epidemic model.

Methods: We used smoking prevalence and population-level lung cancer mortality data for England & Wales, Denmark and the Netherlands, covering the period 1950-2009. To estimate the future smoking-attributable mortality fraction (SAF) we: (i) project lung cancer mortality by extrapolating age-period-cohort trends, using the observed convergence of smoking prevalence and similarities in past lung cancer mortality between men and women as input; and (ii) add other causes of death attributable to smoking by applying a simplified version of the indirect Peto-Lopez method to the projected lung cancer mortality.