Trends in Alcohol Consumption and Violent Deaths

Alcohol intoxication plays a significant role in many kinds of violent deaths. In the present study an attempt is made to test the hypothesis that the strong increase in alcohol consumption in Norway after World War II has had a significant effect on rates of violent deaths. The method used is indirect, and consists of analysing trends in alcohol consumption in relation to trends in rates of violent deaths. The data were obtained from official statistics. Rates of violent deaths turned out to have increased only slightly during this period. It is shown that this does not necessarily contradict the hypothesis. When modern statistical techniques for time series analysis are utilized, a significant correlation between changes in alcohol consumption and rates of violent deaths is uncovered. The data suggest that there has been a fairly strong increase in rates of alcohol-related violent deaths, and hence that non-alcoholic violent deaths, have been decreasing. As a partial test of the validity of this result, age- and sex-specific mortality rates are analysed in relation to per capita alcohol consumption in order to see how the alleged increase was distributed across strata, As was expected, the increase turned out to be particularly strong among males, while among females the relationship was much weaker, and not statistically significant in the adult female population at large. Also according to expectations, there were no significant effects in the older age groups. For females, a significant effect could be demonstrated in the age group 15–60 years, and the effect was about one fourth of the effect among males. This difference corresponds to the sex differences with respect to consumption levels, according to survey data. In the younger age groups the effect was stronger than expected, and this may be due to the fact that the increase in alcohol consumption has been higher among adolescents and young adults than in the rest of the population. From the model fitted to the data it was calculated that among adult Norwegian males alcohol related deaths have increased from about (standard errors in parentheses) 25 (8)% of all violent deaths in the early 1950's to about 50 (15)% in the late 1970's. Independent evidence from several prevalence studies is compatible with these results, but suggests that the true figures are probably closer to the lower limits than the higher limits. The decrease in non-alcoholic violent deaths implied by this result is corroborated by the fact that industrial accidents have gone down from one third to one sixth of all violent deaths during this period, and in Norway 90–95% of these accidents are non-alcoholic.