Trendspotting: Alcohol-Related Deaths Jumped in 2020

NewsWire: 3/30/22

• The number of Americans dying from alcohol-related causes jumped in 2020. This figure rose an eye-popping +25% YoY, which outpaced the overall rate of increase in deaths from all causes that year. (The New York Times)
  
• NH: Throughout the pandemic, we have been carefully tracking the ever-worsening opioid epidemic. The number of Americans dying of drug overdoses keeps climbing (see “Fentanyl Epidemic Accelerates” and “OD Deaths Continue to Skyrocket”). Now here comes a new JAMA study that shows alcohol-related deaths have also risen sharply, and that an increasing share of these deaths is connected to opioids.
• “Alcohol-related deaths” refers to all deaths in which alcohol was listed as an underlying or contributing cause, such those tagged formally by the CDC as deaths from liver disease, traffic accidents, or drug overdoses. (Only a small number of deaths are directly attributed to alcohol poisoning.)
• In 2020, the number of alcohol-related deaths rose an astonishing +25% YoY, from 78,927 to 99,017. This figure began growing at the start of the pandemic and remained elevated going into 2021. More people died in 2020 from alcohol-related causes than from drug overdoses (just under 92K). 

• The alcohol-related death rate rose for all age groups, but the largest increases were among people ages 35-44 (+39.7%) and 25-34 (+37.0%). This lines right up with a grim longtime trend we have noted when it comes to recent declines in life expectancy: It’s Americans in midlife and young adulthood, not the elderly, who are driving the decline. (See “Life Expectancy: America Falling Further Behind Western Europe” and “Adults Under Age 65 Driving Decline in U.S. Life Expectancy.”)
• Deaths that involved opioids and alcohol saw the biggest increases of any underlying cause. Opioid overdose deaths in which alcohol was also a contributing cause jumped by +40.8% to 11,969, while overdose deaths involving alcohol and specifically synthetic opioids (e.g. fentanyl) soared +59.2% to 10,032. Given that 56,516 Americans died in 2020 from synthetic opioids, that means 18% of these deaths were linked to alcohol.
• We've been looking for reasons why the death toll from opioids is so extraordinarily high. The inability to assess dosage of increasingly common and highly lethal components like fentanyl is one. But the common practice of mixing opioids and alcohol with unpredictable effects may be another.
• Many studies, such as this one by the CDC, conclude that roughly 20% of all ER visits and fatal drug overdoses are linked to simultaneous use of alcohol. The use of alcohol with narcotics like opioids is especially dangerous because the two in combination can easily cause a fatal suppression of the respiratory system. But that 20% figure might be an underestimate, since people often don't want to report alcohol consumption. In 2019, the CDC estimated that more than half of people who misuse prescription opioids also binge-drink. Amid the stress and boredom of the first year of the pandemic, this combination had increasingly deadly results.