Analysis of alcohol consumption and death rates resulting from alcohol consumption in EU and OECD countries

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Excessive alcohol consumption has a negative impact on the social or physical lives of human beings and can lead to death or accidents. AIM: The article deals with a multivariate analysis of per capita alcohol consumption and standardized death rates (SDR) from liver cirrhosis, cancer, and road traffic crash deaths resulting from alcohol consumption. The life expectancies in 41 EU and OECD countries were also included in the analysis. METHODS: Correlation analysis helped to detect the significant linear relationship between indicators. Principal component analysis was used to calculate uncorrelated main components that were applied for the next step of the analysis, i.e. cluster analysis. Finally, cluster analysis was used to create groups of countries, i.e. isolated clusters of countries with similar levels of selected indicators. RESULTS: The average pure alcohol consumption per capita in the 41 OECD and EU countries declined from 9.8 litres in 2000 to 9.3 litres in 2016. More than 40% of the total alcohol consumption concerned the consumption of beer. A statistically significant positive correlation was discovered between alcohol consumption and the mortality rates resulting from alcohol consumption caused by liver cirrhosis, cancer, and road traffic crash deaths. CONCLUSIONS: The cluster with the lowest alcohol consumption was created with only two countries (Israel, Turkey), where the alcohol consumption was as low as 2 litres per capita. On the other hand, the cluster with the highest alcohol consumption in 2000 (12.9 litres per capita) included 12 European countries. Their mortality resulting from alcohol consumption was in the “middle” between the clusters. Thus, the cluster with the worst or highest alcohol consumption was not the worst in terms of mortality resulting from alcohol consumption. To detect the most important factors behind this will be a new challenge for subsequent research. © 2019, Sdruzeni SCAN. All rights reserved.