An actuarial approach to comparing early stage and late stage lung cancer mortality and survival

Comparing the mortality characteristics of different cohorts is an essential process in the life insurance industry. Pseudodisease, lead-time bias, and length bias, which are critical to determining the value of cancer screening, have close analogues in life insurance company management, including the temporal impact of underwriting. Ratios of all-cause mortality rates for cancer cohorts relative to standard population mortality rates can provide insights into early stage and late stage mortality differences, differences by age, sex, race, and histology, and allow modeling of biases associated with early stage detection or screening protocols. The Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) data set has characteristics that allow efficient application of actuarial techniques. We show the mortality burden associated with treated early stage lung cancer and that identifying all lung cancers at early stage could reduce US lung cancer deaths by over 70,000 per year.