Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs

The main aim of the present paper was to describe and analyse the recent development regarding differences in alcohol-related mortality between the Nordic countries. To what extent do various forms of alcohol-related mortality differ between the Nordic countries, and is a similar cross-national pattern found for men and women? Do differences in mortality rates correspond to variations in levels of alcohol consumption, and have any changes occurred with respect to these variations?

Age-adjusted mortality from alcohol-specific causes, liver cirrhosis, alcohol poisonings and fatal accidents were compared between countries and in relation to recorded per capita consumption for two approximate time periods, 1995–1999 and 2000–2004 R² was used to evaluate the extent to which differences in per capita consumption accounted for the mortality differences.

Finland and Denmark had typically 2–5 times higher chronic alcohol-related mortality, e.g., cirrhosis, than Sweden, Norway and Iceland, whereas for acute mortality only Finland, and particularly Finnish men, stood out with high mortality rates, e.g., alcohol poisonings. Danish women tended to have higher or more similar mortality in relation to Finnish women in cases when this is not true for men. Differences in per capita consumption accounted for a significant part of variations in chronic alcohol mortality but to a lesser extent for variations in alcohol poisonings and fatal accidents. No marked changes in country differences occurred during the study period.

The results agree with the main prediction of the total consumption model, namely that the level of drinking is an important determinant of alcohol-related harm in society in particular for long-term negative consequences. The findings also suggest that comparisons of alcohol mortality should be gender-specific since the country differences may be different for men and women. The extent to which differences in alcohol policy may influence these national differences is also discussed.

This article, as part of a Nordic project, aims at studying the development of alcohol-related harms in the Danish society in the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when alcohol consumption was stable at a relatively high Nordic level.

The study is based on data on sales of alcohol and on register data on alcohol-related morbidity, mortality, traffic accidents and the development of violent crimes.

Both total alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harm have been practically unchanged during the period, in spite of large changes in consumption of the different types of alcohol. Pancreatitis mortality and hospitalisations of men due to alcoholism, alcohol psychosis and poisoning have increased, while alcohol-related traffic accidents and detentions due to drunkenness have decreased. These developments may mirror changes in the activities and structure of various authorities.

To properly estimate the effects of changes in drinking patterns on alcohol-related harms new measures of alcohol-related harms are needed that take into account the attributable etiological fraction of alcohol to for instance coronary heart disease. There is also a need for better measures of social consequences of drinking.

Our aim was to study whether the development in the rates of harm still follows the development in per capita alcohol consumption, and to clarify the relationship between alcohol consumption and related harms by paying attention to third factors affecting this relationship.

Statistics on alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harm associated with the maintenance of public order and safety alcohol-related deaths and hospitalizations, and treatment for alcohol problems in the period 1990–2004.

In the last 15 years, alcohol consumption in Finland first decreased during the economic recession of the early 1990s, and then increased almost constantly. Some harm series roughly followed these consumption trends, and for some others the connection with alcohol consumption became obvious when the effect of some third factor was taken into account. Harm rates also increased in 2004 when alcohol consumption increased by 10% after a decrease of alcohol excise duty rates of 33% on average.

In Finland changes in alcohol consumption are still today followed by changes in rates of alcohol-related harm.

The objective of the study is to examine the relationship between the total consumption of alcohol and alcohol-related harms in Iceland from 1990 to 2004.

Time-series data on alcohol-related harm have been collected from public statistics, directorates, and surveys.

Alcohol sales have increased from 4.6 to 6.7 litres of alcohol per 100 000 inhabitants aged 15 and over from 1988 to 2004, an increase of 46% in 16 years. In the study period, violent offences, drink driving, injuries by drink driving, and public intoxication show a downward trend with the exception of 2000, when violent offences, drink driving, and public intoxication all peaked. This increase is very likely caused by the changes in licensing policy in Reykjavik when pubs and bars in the city centre had unrestricted serving-hours. Morbidity and mortality rates have also declined or been stable, but are based on very low numbers, so random fluctuations may affect the data series.

Main findings of this study show a decrease in the alcohol-related harms in a period of strongly increasing alcohol consumption. The most likely explanation is that an extensive treatment service available for people with alcohol problems along with a high level of AA membership have decreased the rates of alcohol-related harms on the population level.

This study aims to examine whether the significant increase in alcohol consumption in Norway since 1993 is reflected in various alcohol-related harms over the same period.

The study draws on various register statistics and population sample surveys that provide mostly annual time series data on alcohol-related mortality morbidity crimes and other social harms.

When examining a wide range of alcohol-related harms some—but not all—harm trends were found to follow the same increasing trend as alcohol consumption. The results are discussed with respect to data accuracy as well as more substantive possible explanations for a mismatch in trends in consumption and harms.

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the development in alcohol-related mortality and other indicators of alcohol-related harm for the period 1990–2005 but with focus on the recent period of rising population drinking.

The harm indicators included are various forms of alcohol-related mortality (accidents, cirrhosis, suicide, homicide and an index of alcohol-specific mortality) and hospitalisations (index of alcohol-specific diagnoses, liver cirrhosis and alcohol poisonings) as well as alcohol-related crime indicators (police-reported assaults, drink-driving offences and police arrests for drunkenness). Data on alcohol consumption were obtained from the Swedish Monitoring survey.

The findings confirm previous studies suggesting that recently alcohol-related mortality in general has not increased as expected with the rise in alcohol consumption. Still, a closer look revealed several indications of higher alcohol mortality today compared with the period before consumption started to increase, e.g., for liver cirrhosis, fatal accidents and alcohol-specific mortality in Southern Sweden. Further, alcohol-related hospitalisations in somatic care and hospitalisations for liver cirrhosis and alcohol poisonings have increased among both men and women and a recent upward trend was found regarding reported drink-driving offences, alcohol-related traffic accidents and violent crimes.

Taking all indicators together suggests that alcohol-related harm in Sweden today has become higher compared with the situation before population drinking started to rise in the late 1990s, though not at the expected extent for all harms. A lower level of drinking in Sweden would most likely give rise to less alcohol-related problems among men and women.

This paper summarizes and discusses the trends in alcohol consumption and various types of alcohol related-harm in the five Nordic countries—Denmark. Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

The development in alcohol consumption versus alcohol-related harm is mixed. In some cases the trends are fairly parallel whereas in other cases they are diverging. This article lays out the different potential methodological and substantive explanations for the diverging trends. as well as discussing their likely explanatory value. Although we have observed that trends in alcohol consumption are not necessarily followed by similar trends in all indicators of alcohol-related harm, we conclude that there is still in general reason to assume that a significant change in total alcohol consumption in a Nordic country is—all other things being equal—likely to be followed by a change in the same direction in various alcohol-related harms in that population.