U.S. Alcohol Related Deaths Doubled Over 20 Years
January 10th, 2020Via: NPR:
More Americans are ordering more rounds, and that’s leading to more funerals, according to a new study on alcohol-related deaths.
Looking at data from the National Center for Health Statistics, researchers estimate deaths from alcohol-related problems have more than doubled over the past nearly 20 years.
Death certificates spanning 2017 indicate nearly 73,000 people died in the U.S because of liver disease and other alcohol-related illnesses. That is up from just under 36,000 deaths in 1999.
Some of the greatest increases were found among women and people who were middle-aged and older.
The study comes from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which is part of the NIH. It was published on Wednesday in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Overall, researchers found men died at a higher rate than women. But when analyzing annual increases in deaths, the largest increase was among white women.
