Simple benchmark for mesothelioma projection for Great Britain.

Background: It is of considerable interest to forecast the future burden of mesothelioma mortality. Data on deaths are available, whereas no measure of asbestos exposure is available.

Methods: We compare two Poisson models: a response-only model with an age-cohort specification and a multinomial model with epidemiologically motivated frequencies.

Results: The response-only model has 5% higher peak mortality than the dose-response model. The former performs slightly better in out-of-sample comparison.

Conclusions: Mortality is predicted to peak at about 2100 deaths around 2017 among males in cohorts until 1966 and below 90 years of age. The response-only model is a simple benchmark that forecasts just as well as more complicated models.