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The likelihood of women in the US dying from alcohol-related causes has increased, according to research published by JAMA Network Open, an American Medical Association journal.
While men were almost three times as likely to die due to the effects of drinking over the period of 1999-2020, the gap is narrowing as the rate of increase in alcohol-related deaths among women has exceeded the rate of increase among men since 2018.
“This study of alcohol-related mortality in the US suggests there has been a significantly higher rate of increase in deaths among female individuals in recent years,” said Ibraheem M. Karaye, a doctor at New York’s Hofstra University who headed up the research team.
“Recent studies indicate a narrowing sex gap, attributed in part to increased alcohol use, high-risk drinking, and alcohol use disorder among women,” the doctors said, adding that more work was needed to “identify the psychosocial and environmental factors associated with these trends.”
But the trend “raises public health concerns,” Karaye and colleagues warned, with women likely to be “more susceptible than men to alcohol-related illness.”
“Heightened alcohol consumption among women may be associated with elevated complications due to metabolic and physiological differences,” they said.
“Women tend to have a higher percentage of body fat and a lower percentage of body water compared with men, resulting in higher alcohol blood concentrations and potentially increasing vulnerability to complications,” the JAMA paper explained.
With around 140,000 related deaths each year, booze is the fourth-ranked cause of preventable mortality in the US, after smoking, poor diet and physical inactivity.
