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CDC: 1 In 10 Adult Deaths In US Caused By Excessive Drinking
An anonymous reader writes: According to new research from the CDC, 9.8% of deaths in working-age adults (22-64 years old) in the U.S. from 2006 to 2010 were "attributable to excessive drinking." This makes excessive drinking the fourth leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. The study included deaths from medical conditions, such as liver disease and alcohol-induced strokes, as well as deaths from alcohol-related events, like car accidents, homicides, and fall injuries. However, it did not account for cases where excessive alcohol consumption was a factor in contracting conditions like AIDS, pneumonia, and tuberculosis, so the count may actually be higher. Many western states with low population spread out over a large area showed the highest alcohol-related death rates, while states from the east coast and the midwest tended to be on the lower end of the spectrum. The study also tracked years of life lost, which is higher for alcohol-related deaths than for most other types of death. Researcher Robert Brewer said, "One of the issues with alcohol that is particularly tragic is the extent to which it gets people in the prime of their lives."
Guess we better reinstate prohibition. Oh and it must cause health problems, so it needs banning like soda too. Oh yeah, lets not forget "for the children"
Drink to that.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
I don't care if you drink yourself to an early grave.
I don't care if you smoke yourself to an early grave.
I don't care if you eat yourself to an early grave.
This is all about more gov control, taxes, regulation to protect us from ourselves.
It works so well with currently illegal drugs.
I mean, it's probably better that I die from drinking than other people die from murder.
1 in 10 deaths, huh? That's a bold statement considering the huge qualifications on it:
* 22-64 years old
* preventable
So the actual number is much less than 1 in 10, not much more as the summary says.
There's something to be said for passing away while doing something you love.
Having had an alcoholic step dad and grandfather I can say there's many reasons that people drink. Mostly it's one because they want to and if they don't have alcohol they'll use something else smoking, drugs whatever may be available. Alcohol allows people to self medicate and avoid things in life or help to forget things in life, like the fact that their lives didn't turn out as planned. For others it's just an activity because others are doing it around them and they can't stop because they get addicted to it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
From the text: "And those premature deaths cost the United States $224 billion a year, the report found, or $1.90 a drink."
This does not deserve to live on Oprah, much less Slashdot. Not on Fox News, not on Rush Limbaugh, not on Howard Stern, not on Jerry Springer. On its own, exactly as it stands, it would set a new standard for outright stupidity in any legal jurisdiction that has yet to legislate pi = 3.
Oh, but wait, there's a footnote: preventable deaths among working-aged adult Americans. THAT'S NOT FUCKING FINE PRINT. My credibility circuit assigned six zeros (0.00000% chance of being true) before I managed to read the next line.
In all the many long years I've been here, I can not recall a single story headline that revolts me to this degree. I was reading recently Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics by Michael Ignatieff. At some point during his election campaign he said something stupid about the Middle East. His campaign manager pulled him aside and explained to him: "Politicians have nine lives. You just burned eight."
I have a finite amount of all-caps to expend on Slashdot outrage. I just burned 80% of my lifetime supply. Next time I resort to all-caps, I'll never post here again.
The leading cause preventable of death in the U.S. is abortion; about 800,000 per year. Nobody wants to recognize it, however.
The headline implies that alcohol is the sole killer of 1 in 10 adult deaths, but that's just not true. It's 1 in 10 preventable deaths, which is a subset of all deaths that occur. In reality, alcohol probably accounts for 10% of all adult deaths.
Also, they tracked things like car accidents and homicides, which are not deaths caused by alcohol - they're deaths caused by the laws of physics. The only real deaths that can be directly attributed to alcohol are things like alcohol poisoning, cirrhosis of the liver, some forms of liver cancer, and a few other diseases directly related to the consumption of alcohol.
A better headline would've been "CDC: Alcohol contributes to 10% of preventable adult deaths in the US"
Dying of AIDS-related illness is a pretty big stretch. So, you get drunk, have unprotected sex and contract HIV, which attacks your immune system, and you die of an opportunistic virus. That seems to have enough factors involved that putting it on alcohol is an enormous stretch.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Might help.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Would deaths of working-age adults go UP (particularly suicides) if they weren't drinking all the time?
A few drinks of alcohol and you are drunk. Motor skills & reaction time affected, etc. But pot is a very different story.
A decade back I worked a labor job for a plumbing company.
My co-workers were all big pot heads. So much so that my saying "no thanks" to it at work branded me as a "possible narc". Anyway, one thing I noticed about my stoned co-workers? It never affected their performance. Driving? No complaints. Precision in doing their job? They were all generally better at it than I was, regardless of their current or average THC levels.
It was a real eye opener for me. Ever since that experience, and despite not having used pot for over 30 years (and not caring for it when I did try it), I have become "pro pot". In that there is truly no reason to be "anti pot".
But of course drug companies, I mean their paid shills, will disagree.
There is no such thing as a "preventable death", at least until we develop some form of immortality. It can only be delayed or accelerated, and the cause can be shifted. Everyone is going to die at some point in time.
Of *course* the drug lords have lobbyists in DC, they just don't announce themselves. Move the stuff off the black market and profits fall through the floor. Even with all the attempts at restricting production the price of pot in Colorado and other (semi)-legalized states is falling.
Given the fact that prohibition doesn't actually work and never has (we can't even keep drugs out of *prisons*, how could we possibly keep them out of a free society?), there are only two rational reasons to attempt it:
(1) Police empowerment - nothing like a mandate to fight an unwinnable war on an ill-defined subset of the general population to provide an excuse for ever-increasing funding and the erosion of civil rights.
(2) Bolstering the black market. And as a bonus since they're operating outside the law in an extremely lucrative market, the merchants have incentive to resort to violence among themselves and with the authorities, further bolstering (1).
Take your pick. Historically both outcomes are the only major results of any prohibition attempt in a free society.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The high mortality rate due to drinking amongst slashdotters can be directly attributed to physical and emotional abuse. Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP have ushered millions of nerds into an early grave from alcohol poisoning alone. the longterm effects of say, A peoplesoft migration however are much more destructive as theyre often worsened by the invisible culprit of change management. Taking a look at the youth of today, gateways like SCRUM and devops mean that not only are our future hackers drinking more at an early age, theyre forced to undergo gruelling "stand up" meetings that require then to concentrate all their effort into their creamy, underdeveloped legs to keep them aloft. the agony of being away from their natural habitat, the herman miller chair, coupled with the verbal and emotional abuse from phrases like swim-lanes and synergy amount to nothing short of an epidemic in IT.
but you can take action to stop this. IT workers thrive in an environment of nerf, far away from their natural predator the project manager. warmed slices of pizza pie and refreshing caffeinated nectars are what can keep this endangered species of young codelings healthy and free from substance abuse. The presence of the rare git-push neckbeard, or in some collectives a majestic greyhair vax longbeard have confirmed that excessive drinking is in fact no longer a problem in many dimly lit, cool climate colonies.
Good people go to bed earlier.
From your level of reading comprehension I'd say you've had plenty already. *Excessive* drinking increases your risk of imminent death. Meanwhile most of the health benefits have been associated with consumption in the ~1 drink per day range. I think traumatic injury/surgery recovery is the only situation where I've heard of high levels of intoxication being potentially helpful.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
But how many births are caused by excessive drinking?
Dear Government,
Thank you for informing us. I'm glad you're doing research and informing the public. That's your job. Now please go the hell away. You have an unfortunate tendency to find data like this and then use it to try and control my life. If I chose to drink despite this warning, that's my choice.
Both studies illustrate the same problem and it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see the solution.
Ban trees.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The reality is that our bodies react in a number of different ways to a number of different chemicals, so the healthy choice would depend on a number of factors, and your overall long term well being is an even more complicated matter, since it's often dependent upon relationships with others, employment, etc.. If you skip breakfast to make a meeting that grants you a better paying job with more free time, it's probably a net win.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
How about looking closer at the root cause of excessive drinking? (Mainly, that life fucking sucks shit.) Try fixing that first before restricting alcohol further, or whatever they are trying to accomplish. Failing to do that will ensure the "alcohol problems" will just go elsewhere.
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Please, stop calling everything that's unhappy a "TRAGEDY". Do you even know what the word means?
Don't want to die of this? Stop drinking. Not rocket science.
For the majority of cases, obesity is not a tragedy, neither are drug-use deaths, nor AIDS-related deaths nor is DRINKING YOURSELF TO DEATH.
All of them are 95% or more self-inflicted. Pathetic? Yes. Sad? Yes, probably, at the very least on a personal level. But tragic? No. Tragedy implies some sort of impersonal force, or a fate one can't fight against. It entirely absolves people of their own responsibility.
Stop trying to milk sympathy from the general public for entirely avoidable results of peoples' life choices.
If you *do* believe this is tragedy, then you deny people their very basic humanity - their right to make choices for themselves, and suffer/enjoy those consequences. The moment you dismiss peoples' right to make their own important choices, you're logically condoning everything from compulsory abortion (or denial of same) to arranged marriages.
-Styopa
The leading cause preventable of death in the U.S. is abortion; about 800,000 per year. Nobody wants to recognize it, however.
A very good point. It is probably legitimate not to include it in lists as the leading cause, because a large portion of the population does not believe it is death. However, it should be either the first item with a prominent footnote, or listed in a footnote to the first item.
That's self-contradictory. Here's a quote from the New York Police Department:
An alcohol-related car crash involves criminality and therefore cannot be an accident, logically speaking, if those who enforce the law are to be believed.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Well what else would you do in the prime of your life? Spend all day drinking and having sex?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Contributing factor yes, but how about the reason behind drinking. What causes people to turn to alcohol?
Some people are easily addicted, but for others it's often a mental trauma or stress of some sort. So, what about the effects of stress? What about the effects of over-working? Didn't a previous article just mention how much overtime Americans put in?
Alcohol is a factor, but frankly, that's on top of all the stupid shit that drives people to drink. It's also part culturally because it's considered an "adult" way to unwind. Personally for me the drinks are an addendum to gaming or various other activities I do to burn off stress.
I personally enjoy a couple (yes, that's two) rum and cokes after dinner on weekends. The only time I drink more would be if I have guests. However, I know lots of people that burn through that 50-60+hr work week - they've got nothing to do at home - and they hit the clubs or bar to get out and unwind. Those venues of course are primarily drinking establishments, so many of those people end up drinking as well.
I'm certainly not saying that drinking is good. I'm saying that people drink because of a variety of reasons that already contribute to bodily degeneration and ill health effects. It's more than likely the alcohol is a contributing factor, but often these stats are like MADD where they consider alcohol to be a contributing factor in a crash even when somebody drank at 9am and drove at 10pm, or if the driver is transporting drunk *passengers*.
Per the article: "Those causes of death also included falls; homicides; poisoning that involved pills or other substances along with alcohol; and suicides."
Drunk driving or motor impairment is probably easily tracable back to alcohol. But you've also got poisoning from multiple sources that just happen to include alcohol, and suicides which are probably spawned from the same reason that people drink, but not necessarily because of it...
Typically those killed by guns are not the gun owner itself, where as those killed by alcohol, soda and the like is are the drinkers themselves.
First off, the clear majority of deaths by firearms in the US are suicides. The CDC statistics on this are unambiguous. While not every suicide by gun is by the gun owner a large percentage of these suicides are by the person who owns the gun. Furthermore a death by firearm is still a death by firearm. Does it really matter who the gun owner is? If someone else drives a car and kills someone with it, it isn't really very important that the driver wasn't the owner. Same with a firearm. Someone is dead and a firearm was involved.
Second, plenty of deaths relating to alcohol are due to things like drunk driving accidents. In a huge percentage of these cases the person killed was not the person drinking but it still is a death related to alcohol use. Like before, someone is dead and alcohol was involved.
Wouldn't you say that anyone who dies from drinking was drinking excessively. It's the extreme case definition of excessive.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
But here is the thing, alcohol is a carbohydrate and a good amount of the damage it does is really not all that different from fructose.
Incorrect. The physical damage from alcohol is due to two factors: direct toxic effect of the alcohol, mostly on various bits of the nervous system and aldehyde and ketone formation with subsequent liver damage. Alcohol does contribute to calorie intake but this is only a modestly important part of the disease.
You can keep you sugar bogey man bottled up for now.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Blaming firearms for suicide is blaming firearms for mental illness.
It's not about blaming the firearm specifically but it cannot be reasonably argued that firearm do not in many cases facilitate the suicide. Firearms are very efficient tools and their primary purpose is as a weapon. Many suicides are impulsive actions by someone in distress. (there is plenty of evidence on this - look it up) If you want to die, a firearm is a relatively efficient way to do it. There is ample evidence that if the means of suicide is sufficiently inconvenient then a percentage of them will get through the moment of distress. Sometimes people just need a long enough window that they can get help. If the suicide tool is very efficient then the chances of them surviving to get help are reduced.
The simple way to put it is that a suicidal person may still kill themselves but some of them will be saved if the means of suicide are sufficiently inconvenient. Not all but a statistically significant number. Guns don't make people suicidal but they can make carrying out the deed easier.
The very article we're discussing raises the probability that alcohol is the single biggest cause of preventable premature deaths. So I'm not sure what "different type" of harm is being dismissed, and by whom, but your allegation that it's an order of magnitude more deaths is simply contrary to the information presented.
I realize this is off-topic but I have to ask. Are some of the slashot ads now spawning malware tabs? This is a brand new install of windows with full A/V and firewall, clean install of firefox with no plugins. I know the ads are bad (some play audio now without permission), but one appears to be spawning multiple windows to fake updates for firefox or installs for malicious plugins. On a tech news site. This never used to happen before. I apologize for the post, but this is just ridiculous.
There are certainly deaths/years of life lost caused by excessive drinking.
But on the other hand, there are health benefits of moderate drinking.
There's some presentation of health benefits/problems on the Mayo Clinic web site:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/heal...
So, one question would be: how may years of life for the entire population are lost from excessive drinking, how many years
of life for the entire population are gained from moderate drinking? And how can moderate drinking be encouraged while
decreasing excessive drinking?
In general terms it appears that Russian men are very adversely affected by drinking (life expectancy ~64), and French women's long
life expectancies (~85) are helped by their moderate drinking.
But culture in general can be very hard to change!
Time to rename this site "News for People with Knee Jerk Ideological Reactions While Patting Themselves on the Back Just Like Every Other Site on the Internet." God forbid we study the human condition and try to learn for fear that The Big Bad Government will use that information in a way we don't agree with.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
>The CDC's figures for liver disease deaths do not separate cirrhosis from other causes of liver disease.
Like sugar and grains.
http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov...
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
People die in accidents because the car comes to a sudden stop. The car comes to a sudden stop due to an impact. An impact happens because of a misjudgement by the driver. And that driver's misjudgement could happen a lot more easily because of...alcohol!
If it doesn't make sense to you, you're probably too drunk. I know I'm nowhere near drunk enough for your argument to make sense to me!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It is all about the details and perspective really. It is usually really hard for people to understand what is going on behind the numbers as opposed to simply taking the values at face value. There is always the cause VS causality issue as well.
Didn't read the actual article (bc frankly I don't care that much), but I did read the abstract. My thoughts are this: So those deaths that were found to be attributable to alcohol, most of them are not "direct" but rather "attributed". So technically the alcohol didn't kill, the abrupt stopping of the car into a tree did (or the blunt trauma caused by said tree really). Not only that, but many of these "causes" are more like "contributed to" rather than attributed to. That is more like a percentage, not a whole. Not to mention how far down the cause train do you want to go... what caused the drinking, depression? What caused the depression, impotence? So on and etc... Now on all those things, car crash, liver problems, etc... that single death is counted exactly how many times? Then you take those extrapolated values and compare them to population data? Laughable. If however your went through your numbers and made decisions based on some threshold or determined tolerance, to count the one death to exactly one and only one issue, then removed those values from all other counts, and then compared it to population data, it would be somewhat meaningful. Otherwise all you are saying is booze is associated with a bunch of stuff that can kill you, which pretty much everyone knows already.
I recently had a similar issue doing analysis for a client. Where statistically values fell into more than one camp. If you add them all up, you are going to get a number much larger than your actual population. In that instance, I suggested evaluating each individual point by a set agreed upon criteria, which would put it into one particular bucket and not multiple buckets. In this manner you can produce meaningful statistics and can include in your analysis the cravat of exactly how you arrived at your values, which is verifiable, repeatable, and defensible. However doing that is a lot of work and computation, though I saw a lot of letters after the names of people doing that research, so perhaps I should assume they also looked at this.... somehow I doubt it however.
You obviously have never done any real excessive drinking. It's nature's contraceptive!
Unless you are a girl... then it is probably something like 100% give or take a few percentage points (easily attributed to error). :)
I don't trust any statistics about percentages of accidents that are caused by alcohol though. My understanding is that if there is an accident and if anyone involved in the accident has any measurable alcohol in their system then it gets counted. Even with a thoroughly drunk person you can't PROVE that the accident wouldn't have happened anyway.
Don't get me wrong. I think drunk driving is a problem and people caught doing it SHOULD be punished severly. I just don't trust the police investigating accidents to come up with truly un-biased opinions of wether each and ever accident was caused by alcohol or just coincidental.
... to raise a glass in honor of the departed?
I think you meant ...."waiting at the last STOP SIGN waiting for it to turn green...."
I miss George Carlin
you make good points but you are wasting them and your effort feeding the trolls.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
to note the furor of the drinking crowd is much the same as it is with the gun crowd when folks start talking about means to limit their consumption of it.
The fact that alcohol causes quite a bit of death should come as no shock to anyone. The fact that it causes MORE death than the favorite target of activists ( firearms ) these days isn't much of a shock either. What puzzles me is why folks continue to go after one with such ferocity and not the other ? Why is one such a popular icon of EVIL, while the other does even more damage ? ( Don't even get me started about heart disease, medical mistakes and the real scary killers of us all these days )
When was the last time you heard ANYONE speak of banning alcohol, certain types / amounts of alcohol, or alcohol in scary looking bottles ? Any Congressional bills getting drafted on the matter ? Demonstrations by folks with signs ? Anything ?
*crickets*
Exactly.
You do know the chemical pathways of fructose in the body is almost identical to alcohol right? Especially in the liver.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
>The CDC's figures for liver disease deaths do not separate cirrhosis from other causes of liver disease.
Like sugar and grains.
http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov...
Sugar: The Bitter Truth
Sorry, I clicked the links but I think I might have missed an important part of one them. Could someone please tell me what the word "this" in the above quotation refers to? What is about more government control, taxes and regulations?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The cited study count two factors:
>Alcohol attributable deaths(AAD) 28.5 per 100,000 population
>Years of potential life lost (YPLL) 823 per 100,000 population
Thats like 3% of the 10% that maybe actually died directly from an alcohol related cause.
My first question is what constitutes AAD? I could find no definition but given that this appears to be a study mainly directed at demonizing alcohol, use I'll make my own assumption that it is alcohol poisoning, drunk driving accidents, accidental deaths which alcohol is mentioned etc.
YPLL? Heck this is even a more vague category. Most likely overall longevity among drinkers compared to non drinkers. Not related directly to drinking, but hey you died so it counts. Got hit by a bus stone sober crossing the street, but you were a drinker? You still add to the YPLL total just like the guy with liver failure.
Then to take it one more step removed. The Alzheimer's research folks are now claiming that about 1/3 of deaths in senior citizens are Alzheimer related. John Doe died of heart failure, but they also want to count it as Alzheimer's. Why? Because John had Alzheimer's. Not that the condition had any direct causal relationship, he had it, so we can count it in our total. Cancer folks do the same, along with a whole host of other groups pushing for awareness and funding. If you add them up I would not be surprised if they add up to 300% of deaths caused by one thing or another.
If you have cancer, drink alcohol and have Alzheimer's, does that count as a triple word score?
Hic.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'm out of bourbon. Headin' out to the store, brb!
"A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
Used to be if a man drank over 21 drinks a week, he's a heavy drinker. About 14 for women. Now it's 8 a week for women, 15 for men.
http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/faq...
Some say - don't drink at all.
I'd recommend you to take a http://www.lunatus-me.com/abou... pill before consuming alcohol
Casteism