Within this category, 6,845 avoidable deaths among males and 2,689 avoidable deaths among females were calculated in 2010, respectively 2.32% and 0.88% of all deaths recorded during the year.
For malignant neoplasms (oropharyngeal cancer, esophageal cancer, colorectal cancer, laryngeal cancer, liver cancer, breast cancer), the percentage of deaths due to alcohol consumption is 1.38% and 0.51% of all deaths for a total of 4,066 deaths among men and 1,564 deaths among women.
Analyzing the group of diseases of the circulatory system
Ischemic heart diseases for both sexes and cerebral hemorrhage and ischemic stroke exclusively for women, it emerges that 710 deaths of men and 824 deaths of women would have been avoided by eliminating the alcohol.
Alcohol consumption greatly increases the risk of death from digestive system diseases (cirrhosis of the liver, cholelithiasis, acute and chronic pancreatitis). Alcohol-related mortality rates are 0.71% and 0.23% of all deaths for a total of 2,096 deaths among men and 1,956 deaths among women.
- Within this category, 3,640 avoidable deaths among males and 2,093 avoidable deaths among females were calculated in 2010, representing 1.24% and 0.68% respectively of all deaths recorded in the course. of the year.
- For the year 2010 the Istituto Superiore di Sanità estimated the alcohol-related mortality in the population over 15 years, adding the three different categories and recording that the number of deaths attributable to alcohol was overall equal to 16,829, of which 11,670 relating to men and 5,159 to women, representing 3.96% of total male deaths and 1.68% of female deaths.
For both genders, mortality values decrease with increasing age; in particular, the values decrease considerably after the first two age groups. While the type of death that most characterizes the youth age groups is represented by falls, homicides, suicides and other accidents, in the elderly age groups the greatest contribution to mortality derives from vascular, gastroenterological, neuropsychiatric, immunological and oncological diseases.
Conclusions and proposals
In Italy the picture of alcohol consumption is constantly changing and it is evident that its prevention must be reinforced and supported with extreme and timely conviction.
Although the Department of Public Health is committed, albeit with scarce resources, to implement communication, awareness and health promotion initiatives, to obtain an improvement in awareness in the population regarding the risk caused by alcohol consumption, it is evident that an approach exclusively based on this type of prevention is not in itself sufficient to significantly determine an adequate contrast to the risky and harmful consumption of alcoholic beverages.
- The World Health Organization (WHO) but also important technical and economic committees, including that of the United Nations, have remarked to governments around the world that the greatest and immediate advantage in combating alcohol-related risk in the population is linked to the best buy ,
- the best “purchases”, represented by interventions aimed at reconsidering the methods of taxation of alcoholic beverages and the reduction of both physical and economic availability of alcoholic beverages, in particular for minors, making their ubiquitous availability and convenience less easy.
Finally, among the best “purchases” there is the adoption and application of a strict and rigorous regulation of advertising, marketing and marketing methods, in particular those aimed improperly at minors, a topic on which they both expressed themselves many years ago. the Science Group in the European Commission, and the National Alcohol Council.
The normalization of alcohol use, in the light of the cultural changes prompted by the marketing of alcohol and aimed at creating an exclusively positive image (symbol of well-being, success, pleasure, seduction, leadership), continues, in fact, to determine phenomena that go beyond binge drinking and that today come to decline it in various forms of risky and harmful consumption, amplified by the use of technologies and social network communities (for example, nominations, “alcoholic chains”).