Alcohol use has been identified as a major risk factor for the global burden of mortality and morbidity. Due to the overall high level of alcohol use, combined with a high prevalence of irregular binge-drinking patterns, Eastern Europe was found to be one of the regions with the highest burden of alcohol-attributable disease and mortality globally.
Consequently over the last decade, a number of alcohol policies recommended as part of WHO’s “best buys”, policies that are effective and cost-effective, have been implemented in Lithuania.
The aim of the current project, funded by NIAAA (grant no. 1R01AA028224) is to evaluate the effect of these policies across a variety of outcomes including and not limited to mortality and morbidity, alcohol-related harm, alcohol consumption, and economic costs. In addition, we aim to compare the temporal trends and changes in these outcome measures to other neighbouring Baltic states.
The co-PIs of the project are preeminent researchers in the Baltic countries, who had access to high quality data on individual causes of death. Using monthly mortality data from multiple comparable countries allowed the team to carefully analyze the temporal trends in mortality and the impact of various factors (e.g., policy changes, sociocultural differences, economic events) on these trends.
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).