Alcohol is a recognized cause of over 60 injuries and diseases and is consistently in the top 5
most important risk factors for global burden of disease. It is important to be able to measure
how drinking alcohol affects our health, and how our risk of getting injured or acquiring diseases
caused by alcohol is dependent on how much alcohol we drink. This type of information allows
us to make personal choices about our health and is an integral piece of public health evidence to
inform how alcohol policy is informed, implemented, or monitored. This analysis will, for the
first time, model the effects of alcohol for injury outcomes over the entire drinking lifetime for
men and women separately using a new method that aims to improve upon existing calculations
by accounting for different patterns of drinking – both acute consumption and average daily
drinking. In both cases, both the amount consumed and the number of times it is consumed is
taken into account. Within acute consumption, the number of occasions and the amount
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consumed at each occasion was counted. What’s more, for the first time in this field, a lifetime
approach was adopted – risks will no longer be seen as discrete, individual events that occur
independently of each other. In this study, risks are combined much like other exposures to
environmental substances or contaminants – in a cumulative manner over a lifetime of drinking.
The method combines data sources from experimental data, from meta-analyses, Canadian
mortality and hospital data, and survey data, making this a rich, yet complicated analysis. Its
products were dose-response risk curves for each injury outcome, by sex, and age group, and
alcohol-attributable fractions and their variance estimation for mortality and morbidity for injury.
This study has important implications for forming and planning health policy, represents advancements in absolute risk calculation, and will result in important consumer-level information that will enable development of limits around healthy drinking.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/65756 |
| Date | 01 September 2014 |
| Creators | Taylor, Benjamin |
| Contributors | Rehm, Juergen |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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