Alcohol causes more than half of all premature deaths in Russian adults
MEDICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL MEDIA RELEASE
MRC/40/09
EMBARGO: 00:01 hours (UK time) Friday 26 June
Professor Zaridze said: “Russian health continues to be devastated by the effects of alcohol and tobacco. Many Russians die in their twenties, thirties or forties from disease, accidents, violence or suicide caused by drinking.”
Professor Peto said: “If current Russian death rates continue then about 5% of all young women and 25% of all young men will die before age 55 years from the direct or indirect effects of drinking. Our analyses are just of mortality, and ignore any other adverse or beneficial effects of alcohol use on individuals, families or society.”
Russian deaths from disease are further aggravated by widespread smoking; male lung cancer rates (which are driven by smoking and not by drinking) are about 50% higher in Russia than in Western Europe or North America. After the age of 55, tobacco may well cause more deaths than alcohol, but at younger ages alcohol has been shown to cause, in Russia, even more deaths than tobacco.
National mortality statistics show that the overall risk of death among people of working age is now more than four times as great in Russia as in Western Europe (five times as great in Russian men as in West European men, three times as great in Russian women as in West European women). Alcohol and, to a lesser extent, tobacco can account for most or all of the large difference in premature death between Russia and Western Europe in the mortality of adults of working age.
Whereas West European death rates have been decreasing steadily for the past few decades, chiefly due to decreases in tobacco deaths as people stop smoking, Russian death rates at ages 15-54 years have fluctuated wildly, decreasing suddenly when alcohol consumption fell by a quarter in 1985 under President Gorbachev’s 1985-8 anti-alcohol laws, then doubling between 1988 and the peak mortality in 1994, then zig-zagging sharply but remaining fairly high ever since.
Professor Peto said: “When Russian alcohol sales decreased by about a quarter, overall mortality of people of working age immediately decreased by nearly a quarter. This shows that when people who are at high risk of death from alcohol do change their habits, they immediately avoid most of the risk.”
Professor Zaridze added: “The sharp fluctuations in Russian adult mortality rates are unprecedented in a modern industrialised country. Our study confirms that these large fluctuations are due mainly to alcohol, and shows that alcohol is causing more than half of all the deaths of Russians in their twenties, thirties and forties. Without the effects of smoking and excessive drinking, Russia would have the low death rates of Western Europe or North America.”
The study used a ‘reference group’ of men who sometimes drank but usually consumed in total less than 100 ml of pure alcohol a week (e.g. less than a litre of wine, or less than ten 25ml shots of vodka). In comparison, men who averaged three or more half-litre bottles of vodka a week (or the equivalent in other drinks) were more than twice as likely to die of disease, four times as likely to die on the roads, 6 times as likely to die of other accidents, 8 times as likely to commit suicide and nearly 10 times as likely to be murdered. For women, the death rate ratios were even more extreme. Some men who drank a lot of vodka also drank some types of alcohol-containing fluids not intended for human consumption, but it was probably the alcohol itself rather than any contaminants that caused their high risk of death.
Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Chief Executive of the UK Medical Research Council, which contributed to the funding of the study, said: “This study shows that, worldwide, millions of premature deaths a year are caused by excessive alcohol use, tobacco smoking or a combination of the two.
The MRC is committed to supporting global research that addresses the inequalities in health in different nations and is currently driving research in the UK in the area of addiction and alcohol misuse.”
Notes to editors:
For further information and to arrange an interview with Professor Peto (UK) or Professor Zaridze (Russia) on this project, please contact Nicola Osmond-Evans in the UK MRC Press Office on 0207 670 5138/020 7637 6011 or press.office@headoffice.mrc.ac.uk
Original Research paper: Alcohol and cause-specific mortality in Russia: a retrospective case-control study of 48,557 adult deaths, published in The Lancet 27 June 2009, vol 373, pages 2201-14.
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