Deaths and Years of Potential Life Lost From Excessive Alcohol Use — United States, 2011–2015

Abstract

Excessive alcohol use is a leading cause of preventable death in the United States (1) and costs associated with it, such as those from losses in workplace productivity, health care expenditures, and criminal justice, were $249 billion in 2010 (2). CDC used the Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) application* to estimate national and state average annual alcohol-attributable deaths and years of potential life lost (YPLL) during 2011-2015, including deaths from one's own excessive drinking (e.g., liver disease) and from others' drinking (e.g., passengers killed in alcohol-related motor vehicle crashes). This study found an average of 95,158 alcohol-attributable deaths (261 deaths per day) and 2.8 million YPLL (29 years of life lost per death, on average) in the United States each year. Of all alcohol-attributable deaths, 51,078 (53.7%) were caused by chronic conditions, and 52,921 (55.6%) involved adults aged 35-64 years. Age-adjusted alcohol-attributable deaths per 100,000 population ranged from 20.8 in New York to 53.1 in New Mexico. YPLL per 100,000 population ranged from 631.9 in New York to 1,683.5 in New Mexico. Implementation of effective strategies for preventing excessive drinking, including those recommended by the Community Preventive Services Task Force (e.g., increasing alcohol taxes and regulating the number and concentration of alcohol outlets), could reduce alcohol-attributable deaths and YPLL. † CDC has updated the ARDI application, including the causes of alcohol-attributable death, International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision codes, § and alcohol-attributable fractions. ¶ CDC used ARDI to estimate the average number of annual national and state alcohol-attributable deaths and YPLL caused by excessive drinking (i.e., deaths from conditions that are 100% alcohol-attributable, acute conditions that involved binge drinking, and chronic conditions that involved medium or high average daily alcohol consumption). ARDI estimates alcohol-attributable deaths by multiplying the total number of deaths (based on vital statistics) with an underlying cause corresponding to any of the 58 alcohol-related conditions in the ARDI application by its alcohol-attributable fraction. Some conditions (e.g., alcoholic liver cirrhosis) are wholly (100%)

Global estimates of the attributable risk of alcohol consumption on road injuries

“…impaired driving (National Center for Statistics & Analysis, 2020).The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced a report using acute exposure to alcohol and found that between 2011 and 2105, the alcohol-attributable fraction among men ranged from 0.15 (among those aged 65+) to 0.49 (those aged 25-34), and among women between 0.11 (among those aged 65+) and 0.40 (those aged 20-34) (Centers for DiseaseControl & Prevention., 2019;Esser et al, 2020). In contrast, our estimated PAR of alcohol for road injuries in the United States in 2019 was 10.16%, suggesting again a possible underestimation of PAR by the GBD, possibly due to the GBD study's reliance on chronic alcohol consumption data.…”

“…Limitations of the GBD data are related to the quality and validity of alcohol consumption measurement across countries (recorded and unrecorded per capita alcohol consumption), and reduced availability of data for different consumption patterns in age and sex groups, and for periods further away in time (GBD 2016Alcohol Collaborators, 2018. With only a few high-income countries, such as the USA, having the resources to produce their own burden of disease estimates for alcohol use (Esser et al, 2020), currently there are only 2 sources that aggregate global mortality data by injury (including road injuries) and associated risk factors (including alcohol).…”

“…The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that 28% of traffic deaths in 2019 involved a driver or pedestrian with a blood alcohol content of 0.8% or higher, defined as alcohol- For comparative purposes, we compiled PAR estimates from several different countries, for both nonfatal (upper part of the table ) and fatal road injuries (lower part of the table; Table S4) (Borges et al, 2017b;Cherpitel et al, 2015;Esser et al, 2020;Hill-McManus et al, 2014;Jones et al, 2008;Kuendig et al, 2008;Laslett et al, 2010;Martin et al, 2017;Petridou et al, 1998;Santoyo-Castillo et al, 2018;Shield et al, 2020;Taylor et al, 2011;Wainiqolo et al, 2016;Webster et al, 2019;WHO, 2018). Collectively, these reports show the importance of alcohol consumption as a key modifiable risk factor for the prevention of road injuries in several countries and globally.…”

Binge Drinking Among Adults, by Select Characteristics and State — United States, 2018

“…Corresponding author: Michele K. Bohm, mbohm@cdc.gov, 770-488-3928. 1 Division of Population Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, CDC; 2 Division of HIV Prevention, National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, CDC.…”

Out With the Old, in With the New: Replacing the “6-Month Abstinence Rule” With Integrated Care for Alcohol-Associated Liver Disease

“…B etween 2011 and 2015, excessive drinking was responsible for an average of 93,296 deaths (255 per day) and 2.7 million years of potential life lost (29 years lost per death, on average) each year in the United States. 1 Within this estimate, which comprised deaths directly caused by alcohol, deaths partially attributable to alcohol, and deaths due to someone else's drinking, alcoholassociated liver disease (ALD) was the leading chronic cause of directly alcohol-attributable deaths overall (n ¼ 18,164) and among males (n ¼ 12,887) and females (n ¼ 5,277). Based on estimates of sales of alcoholic beverages and recent studies indicating that alcohol consumption increased subsequent to April 2020, these trends have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic.…”