English summary: THE INFLUENCE OF ALCOHOL ON MORTALITY IN FINLAND, DENMARK AND SWEDEN IN 2002

Background

Alcohol use can both cause and prevent deaths. The present study estimates the influence of alcohol on mortality in Finland, Denmark and Sweden in 2002.

Methods

The data included the numbers of deaths in various age- and sex-specific underlying cause-of-death categories, the respective population sizes and alcohol consumption levels. For causes of death explicitly attributed to alcohol by the category name the causal effect was taken to be 100%. The alcohol-attributable component for other conditions was derived using exposure stratum-specific relative risk estimates. The estimates pertain to the population aged 20 years or older.

Results

In Finland, 2.232 male deaths were attributed to alcohol. Without alcohol use, there would have been an excess of 587 deaths among women. The net effect of alcohol was 1.645 deaths in 2002. Most deaths attributed to alcohol were due to liver cirrhosis, injuries and poisonings. The proportion of these deaths was especially high in the working-age population. The number of deaths per one million litres of alcohol sold was 42 in Finland, 60 in Denmark and 10 in Sweden.

Conclusions

The present results suggest that there were an estimated 1.645 deaths due to alcohol use in Finland in 2002. This estimate is 12% higher than the number of alcohol-related causes of death in the official statistics of Finland. The number of these deaths is likely to be explained by alcohol consumption, frequency of intoxicating drinking and the effective cause-of-death examination system in Finland. The same might be true for the differences between the countries.