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Furthermore, the results of these analyses are generalizable to other regions, as they were conducted on high-income EU countries. With such a precise scale of data, the team has been able to rigorously test the impact of alcohol control policies on all-cause mortality, and other cause-specific mortality rates as well (e.g., suicide, liver cirrhosis, homicide rates, traffic injuries).
Vaitkevičiūtė, J., Gobiņa, I., Janik-Koncewicz, K., Lange, S., Miščikienė, L., Petkevičienė, J., ...
& Jiang, H. (2023). Alcohol control policies reduce all-cause mortality in Baltic Countries
and Poland between 2001 and 2020. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 6326.
Štelemėkas, M., Manthey, J., Badaras, R., Casswell, S., Ferreira‐Borges, C., Kalėdienė, R., ...
& Rehm, J. (2021). Alcohol control policy measures and all‐cause mortality in Lithuania:
an interrupted time–series analysis. Addiction, 116(10), 2673-2684.
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Consistently across our published studies, alcohol pricing (i.e., taxation) has emerged as an effective policy that not only predicts reductions in the above mentioned causes of death, but more importantly, predicts reductions in alcohol consumption per capita.
As demonstrated in this figure, the scaled increases in taxation (shown in the black line) overlaps with years in which there were declines in alcohol consumption per capita. This effect of significantly increased taxation, leading to reduced APC was evident across the Baltic countries.
In addition to the investigation of alcohol control policy effects on the epidemiology of disease, we conducted studies on real-world outcomes. In Lithuania, the co-Pis conducted a mystery shopper study, where researchers tested the enforcement of the recently increased minimum legal drinking age in Lithuania.
Another observational study conducted in Lithuania measured the prevalence of social media posts related to alcohol, in effect, testing the whether legislation that banned advertising and marketing of alcohol products was upheld by the alcohol industry.
The project will continue to run until March of 2025, with a recent supplement received that will focus on understanding the impact of COVID-19 on alcohol consumption patterns in different populations and on the same alcohol-attributable disease outcomes.
Research Team
Publications resulting from NIAAA grant on Lithuania
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