Since 2010, Brazil has never counted as many deaths attributable to alcohol consumption as in 2020 – not by chance, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2020, there were 8,169 deaths entirely attributable to alcohol in the country — a 24% increase over the 2019 figure (6,594). It was also considerably higher than the average of deaths of this type in the previous ten years, from 2010 to 2019: 6,830. The data were revealed by the Center for Information on Health and Alcohol (CISA) this Tuesday (14/6), based on figures from DataSUS.
Deaths totally attributable to alcohol are considered to be those that could have been avoided if there was no consumption of beverages. This is the case of alcohol poisoning, alcoholic myopathy, fetal alcohol syndrome and mental and behavioral disorders directly linked to alcohol, among others.
The publication “Álcool e a Saúde dos Brasileiros – Panorama 2022” also shows that, at the same time, the volume of hospital admissions totally attributable to alcohol dropped by 15% in 2020, compared to 2019.
Psychiatrist and executive president of CISA, Arthur Guerra explains to BBC News Brazil that the drop in hospitalizations is “totally explainable due to the pandemic”, when hospitals were overwhelmed by Covid-19 and there was less demand from people for care due to other problems of health.
As for the higher mortality attributable to alcohol, Guerra says the reason still needs to be studied, but there is suspicion.
“Is there a relationship between these two numbers (increase in mortality and drop in hospitalizations)? Could the number of deaths be explained by the drop in hospitalizations? for the importance of conducting research with scientific criteria to answer these questions.
The highest growth in alcohol-attributable deaths in Brazil in 2020 occurred among adults aged 35 to 54 years old (25.6% increase), followed by the age group of 55 years and over (23% increase) and 18 to 34 years old ( 19.5% increase. For men and women, the observed growth was similar.
“We have no doubt that there has been more alcohol consumption at home during the pandemic period. But alcohol in general doesn’t cause death in the short term — unless the person doesn’t stay at home, drive a car, something like that. . Death from alcohol consumption usually happens after a slow process: from cirrhosis, pancreatitis, alcoholic dementia…” explained the president of CISA, responding to — and refuting — the possibility that higher mortality could be related to greater alcohol consumption during this period.
It is precisely in this slow process that people with alcohol dependence are treated, in the so-called primary care —represented, for example, by the Psychosocial Care Centers (CAPS). This type of outpatient rather than inpatient treatment is often the most important for people at risk.
“And primary care was greatly damaged in the pandemic”, recalls Arthur Guerra.
As BBC News Brasil showed in March, an increase in alcohol-related deaths was also detected in the United States in the first year of the pandemic. According to researchers at the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the number of deaths involving alcohol increased from 78,927 in 2019 to 99,017 in 2020, an increase of 25.5%.
Official data from the UK also show an unprecedented growth in 2020 of alcohol-attributable deaths, an increase of 18.6% compared to 2019 (from 7,565 to 8,974 deaths). It was the highest number since this type of information began to be collected in 2001.
“When trying to understand the high rates of specifically alcohol-related mortality seen since April 2020, there will be many complex factors, and it may take some time for us to fully understand all of them,” says the UK government’s website.
Another survey on Brazil, carried out by the organization Vital Strategies, had shown that from 2019 to 2020, there was an 18.4% increase in deaths related to “mental and behavioral disorders due to alcohol use”.
According to CISA, the slightly different data in its publication in relation to the Vital Strategies survey are due to different methodologies and the moment of data extraction —since the center worked with consolidated information, subsequent to procedures for reviewing and correcting the information by the DataSUS.
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