Objective: Alcohol use is one of the ten most common risk factors threatening global health that is avoidable (ranked fifth after smoking). It is involved in high rates of liver cirrhosis, epilepsy, hypertension, cerebrovascular and mental illness. Negative consequences of family and social drinking are also very significant. The aim of the study is to quantify the gender and age-differentiated disparities in alcohol-related mortality in the population over 16 years between the years 1996-2017 in Slovakia.
Methods: We used data from mortality reports within 1996-2017 provided by the National Health Information Centre in the Slovak Republic. We applied two-dimensional correspondence analysis where dimensions are age and chosen causes of deaths induced by use of alcohol and classified by the International Classification of Diseases.
Results: In case of males, we found that K74 - Fibrosis and cirrhosis of liver diagnosis almost perfectly corresponds to age 66-75 years, and we documented strong correspondence between K70 - Alcoholic liver disease and age 46-55 years. For females, the most robust finding is that K70 - Alcoholic liver disease corresponds relatively similarly with age groups 26-35, 36-45, 46-55. The results of the analysis allow us to obtain a detailed overview of the development of mortality in individual alcohol diagnoses and their intervention in individual age groups by gender. Mortality for some diagnoses affects the young female as well as male population. We observed that there are systematic differences in alcohol-induced mortality between males and females.
Conclusions: In such development of the alcohol-related mortality structure, the priority remains the permanent provision of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention at the individual and population level. The results of our analysis represent a valuable platform for health and social policymakers to develop quality national and regional health strategies aimed at eliminating the consequences of alcohol use. Lessons learned from our analysis will be supported by our other geographically oriented analytical lines to link identified and quantified regional disparities in the mortality of alcohol diagnoses to the availability of health care to treat these diseases.
Keywords: age; alcohol; alcohol-related mortality; correspondence analysis; gender; significant regional disparities.