New research has shown a marked increase in alcohol-related mortality among women in their 30s and 40s, contrary to the recent overall picture of falling numbers of deaths in England and Scotland.
Published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (open access), the study found that a disproportionate rise in alcohol-related deaths occurred among the generation of women born in the 1970s, compared with all other age/sex birth cohorts.
Examining alcohol-related mortality in Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool – cities with high levels of deprivation – the report’s authors found that death rates among this cohort of females increased at a faster rate than for males (data is publicly available; the authors are happy to share the manipulated dataset).
They concluded that this trend ‘raises real concerns for the long-term health of this cohort in both England and Scotland’, and that it is ‘imperative that this early warning sign in young women in the UK is acted on if deaths from alcohol are to reduce in the long term’.