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The Impact of Multifactorial Genetic Disorders on Critical Illness Insurance: A Simulation Study Based on UK Biobank

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2015

Angus Macdonald ,
Delme Pritchard  and
Pradip Tapadar
Angus Macdonald
Affiliation:
Maxwell Institute for Mathematical Sciences and Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, U.K., Tel: +44(0)131-451-3209, Fax: +44(0)131-451-3249, E-mail: A.S.Macdonald@ma.hw.ac.uk
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Abstract

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The UK Biobank project is a proposed large-scale investigation of the combined effects of genotype and environmental exposures on the risk of common diseases. It is intended to recruit 500,000 subjects aged 40-69, to obtain medical histories and blood samples at outset, and to follow them up for at least 10 years. This will have a major impact on our knowledge of multifactorial genetic disorders, rather than the rare but severe single-gene disorders that have been studied to date. What use may insurance companies make of this knowledge, particularly if genetic tests can identify persons at different risk? We describe here a simulation study of the UK Biobank project. We specify a simple hypothetical model of genetic and environmental influences on the risk of heart attack. A single simulation of UK Biobank consists of 500,000 life histories over 10 years; we suppose that case-control studies are carried out to estimate age-specific odds ratios, and that an actuary uses these odds ratios to parameterise a model of critical illness insurance. From a large number of such simulations we obtain sampling distributions of premium rates in different strata defined by genotype and environmental exposure. We conclude that the ability of such a study reliably to discriminate between different underwriting classes is limited, and depends on large numbers of cases being analysed.

Keywords

Case-control StudyCritical Illness InsuranceGene-environment InteractionOdds RatioPremium RatingSimulationUK Biobank
Type
Articles
Information
ASTIN Bulletin: The Journal of the IAA , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , November 2006 , pp. 311 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © ASTIN Bulletin 2006

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