Alcohol and the burden of disease

Abstract

World Health Organization (WHO) lists alcohol consumption as a leading risk to health, contributing 4% to the global burden of disease. This serves as justification for far-reaching preventive interventions. The purpose of this article is to recapitulate in narrative some of the assumptions upon which WHO conclusions rest and to interpret their validity accordingly. First, it may be misleading to include ‘alcohol use’ as a risk to health. As alcohol use has beneficial, protective as well as harmful properties, burden assessment should be based on harmful aspects only, e.g., ‘hazardous patterns of alcohol use’. Second, assessments of interventions aimed at reducing risks from alcohol use to disease burden should also consider such interventions’ impact on dimensions other than health or disease–in particular, psychosocial benefits of alcohol consumption. Third, the uncertainties associated with both the database and methodology for estimating the disease burden attributable to alcohol are high and need to be considered in the interpretation of findings.

• Alcohol consumption
• burden of disease
• patterns of drinking