Lifetime-risk of alcohol-attributable mortality based on different levels of alcohol consumption in seven European countries

The content of this report represents the views of the authors and is their sole responsibility; it can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Commission and/or the Consumers, Health and Food Executive Agency or any other body of the European Union. [...] The schematic figure below shows the principle of the calculations: The first step is to identify the proportion of the cumulative lifetime mortality rate which is attributable to current alcohol consumption (in this case for the year 2012). [...] First of all we defined lifetime as up to age 75 5. Further, the following issues were addressed as 4. We actually modelled the cohort between 0 and 74 years of age, but before age 15, as modelled in the Comparative Risk Analyses of the Global Burden of Disease studies and the Global Status Reports on Alcohol and Health of the WHO, we assumed no alcohol consumption. [...] We chose the weighted summation of disease-specific risks rather than using the overall risk function between alcohol use and mortality (e.g., (36-38)), as taking studies on all-cause mortality as the basis for low-risk drinking guidelines for any jurisdiction assumes, that the age- and cause of death distributions of the underlying cohort studies are similar to the respective distributions of the [...] The list here is identical to the alcohol-attributable causes of deaths, used as a basis of the Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health (1), and to the alcohol-attributable causes used in the Global Burden of 9 Disease Study (22) except the definition of AUD.