SeriesGlobal burden of disease and injury and economic cost attributable to alcohol use and alcohol-use disorders
Section snippets
Alcohol as a risk factor for disease
Alcohol has been a part of human culture since the beginning of recorded history.1 Almost all societies that consume alcohol show related health and social problems. The industrialisation of production and globalisation of marketing and promotion of alcohol have increased both the amount of worldwide consumption and the harms associated with it. These developments have led to several resolutions by the World Health Assembly and WHO Regional Committees, outlining the public health problems
Indicators of alcohol consumption, mortality, and burden of disease
The exposure data for recorded and unrecorded alcohol consumption per adult for 2003—the most recent year of available comprehensive data—were taken from the WHO Global Status Report on Alcohol 200414 and the WHO Global Information System on Alcohol and Health, which provides regular updates on these data. Recorded alcohol consumption per adult was based on government records (taxation) and industry publications for the production and sales of alcohol, and data from the Food and Agriculture
Exposure to alcohol
Overall, there is wide variation around the worldwide consumption average of 6·2 L of pure alcohol (defined as 100% ethanol) per adult per year (figure 1). The countries with the highest overall consumption are in eastern Europe around Russia, but other areas of Europe also have high overall consumption (WHO Europe region 11·9 L per adult). The Americas are the region with the next highest overall consumption (WHO Americas region 8·7 L per adult). Apart from a few countries, some of them in
Conclusions
Our analysis does have some general limitations, such as the data quality of health outcomes relevant to all global studies—ie, mortality and burden of disease and specific limitations for a CRA for alcohol (Murray and Frenk53 provide a general discussion of the limitations). Furthermore, we refer only to ongoing discussions on DALY assumptions17 including the derivation of the DALY weights,54 and on data quality for global mortality.19
Our approach also has some specific limitations. First,
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