JAMA Study: Excessive Alcohol Abuse Assessment

A new study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open finds that an estimated 1 in 5 deaths among adults aged 20–49 years is due to excessive alcohol use. Researchers from CDC and the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research analyzed average annual deaths during 2015–2019 from the Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) application and total deaths from the National Vital Statistics System. Alcohol consumption is a leading preventable cause of death in the U.S., and death rates from fully alcohol-attributable causes have increased in the past decade, including among adults aged 20 to 64 years. However, a comprehensive assessment of alcohol-attributable deaths among this population, including from partially alcohol-attributable causes, is lacking.