One in 10 deaths among working-age adults in U.S. due to excessive drinking, report finds

 

June 27, 2014

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Excessive alcohol use accounts for one in 10 deaths among working-age adults ages 20-64 years in the United States, according to a new report. Excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths per year from 2006 to 2010, and shortened the lives of those who died by about 30 years. These deaths were due to health effects from drinking too much over time, such as breast cancer, liver disease, and heart disease; and health effects from drinking too much in a short period of time, such as violence, alcohol poisoning, and motor vehicle crashes.

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A new report finds that excessive alcohol use accounts for one in 10 deaths among working-age adults ages 20-64 years in the United States.

Excessive alcohol use accounts for one in 10 deaths among working-age adults ages 20-64 years in the United States, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published June 26 in Preventing Chronic Disease.

Excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths per year from 2006 to 2010, and shortened the lives of those who died by about 30 years. These deaths were due to health effects from drinking too much over time, such as breast cancer, liver disease, and heart disease; and health effects from drinking too much in a short period of time, such as violence, alcohol poisoning, and motor vehicle crashes. In total, there were 2.5 million years of potential life lost each year due to excessive alcohol use.

Nearly 70 percent of deaths due to excessive drinking involved working-age adults, and about 70 percent of the deaths involved males. About 5 percent of the deaths involved people under age 21. The highest death rate due to excessive drinking was in New Mexico (51 deaths per 100,000 population), and the lowest was in New Jersey (19.1 per 100,000).

"Excessive alcohol use is a leading cause of preventable death that kills many Americans in the prime of their lives," said Ursula E. Bauer, Ph.D., M.P.H., director of CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. "We need to redouble our efforts to implement scientifically proven public health approaches to reduce this tragic loss of life and the huge economic costs that result."

Excessive drinking includes binge drinking (4 or more drinks on an occasion for women, 5 or more drinks on an occasion for men), heavy drinking (8 or more drinks a week for women, 15 or more drinks a week for men), and any alcohol use by pregnant women or those under the minimum legal drinking age of 21. Excessive drinking cost the United States about $224 billion, or $1.90 per drink, in 2006. Most of these costs were due to lost productivity, including reduced earnings among excessive drinkers as well as deaths due to excessive drinking among working age adults.

To estimate deaths due to excessive drinking, CDC scientists analyzed data from the Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) application for 2006-2010. ARDI provides national and state-specific estimates of alcohol-attributable deaths and years of potential life lost. ARDI currently includes 54 causes of death for which estimates of alcohol involvement were either directly available or could be calculated based on existing scientific information.

"It's shocking to see the public health impact of excessive drinking on working-age adults," said Robert Brewer, M.D., M.S.P.H., head of CDC's Alcohol Program and one of the report's authors. "CDC is working with partners to support the implementation of strategies for preventing excessive alcohol use that are recommended by the Community Preventive Services Task Force, which can help reduce the health and social cost of this dangerous risk behavior."

The independent HHS Community Preventive Services Task Force recommends several evidence-based strategies to reduce excessive drinking. These include increasing alcohol taxes, regulating alcohol outlet density, and avoiding further privatization of alcohol retail sales.

For more information about excessive drinking, including binge drinking, and how to prevent this dangerous behavior, visit the CDC's Alcohol and Public Health website at http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/index.htm. Members of the public who are concerned about their own or someone else's drinking can call 1-800-662-HELP to receive assistance from the national Drug and Alcohol Treatment Referral Routing Service.

For state-specific estimates of deaths and years of potential life lost due to excessive drinking by condition, visit the ARDI online application at https://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/ardi/HomePage.aspx.

How common are cruel comments posted to online news sites?

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Anyone who's ever ventured into the comments section of a news website has likely observed some unfriendly exchanges. Now research from the University of Utah and the University of Arizona has confirmed just how common such behavior is.

In a new study published in the Journal of Communication, researchers analyzed more than 6,400 reader comments posted to the website of the Arizona Daily Star, the major daily newspaper in Tucson, Arizona. They found that more than 1 in 5 comments included some form of incivility, with name-calling as the most prevalent type.

"We tracked six different kinds of uncivil language, but name-calling was far and away the most common," said Kevin Coe, assistant professor of communication at the University of Utah and one of the study's authors. "Many people just can't seem to avoid the impulse to go after someone else."

The study also showed that these types of commenters do not fit the stereotype of a few angry individuals who spend hours at their computers blasting others and making baseless claims. In fact, incivility was more common among infrequent commenters. Equally surprising, uncivil commenters were just as likely to use evidence in support of their claims as were the more respectful individuals.

As might be expected, stories that focused on well-known leaders with clear partisan positions garnered more impolite comments. In stories that quoted President Barack Obama, for example, nearly 1 in 3 comments were uncivil.

Disrespectful comments also tended to spike in discussions about weightier issues, such as politics, the economy, crime and taxes. The one exception to this trend was sports articles, which generated the highest percentage of these types of comments.

"Being a sports fan myself, this didn't surprise me," said Coe. "Honestly, the only online incivility I've ever been guilty of was probably sports-related."

The researchers noted one cause for optimism in their findings. When one commenter was directly replying to another commenter, they were more likely to be courteous.

"We tend to be more respectful in our public discourse when we recognize other citizens' perspectives, even when we do not agree with them," noted Kate Kenski, associate professor of communication at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study. "When we quote others participating in an online discussion, we tend to focus on their arguments, not on personal attributions, which makes the conversation more civil."

Noninvasive brain control: New light-sensitive protein enables simpler, more powerful optogenetics

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Optogenetics, a technology that allows scientists to control brain activity by shining light on neurons, relies on light-sensitive proteins that can suppress or stimulate electrical signals within cells. This technique requires a light source to be implanted in the brain, where it can reach the cells to be controlled.

Optogenetics, a technology that allows scientists to control brain activity by shining light on neurons, relies on light-sensitive proteins that can suppress or stimulate electrical signals within cells. This technique requires a light source to be implanted in the brain, where it can reach the cells to be controlled.

MIT engineers have now developed the first light-sensitive molecule that enables neurons to be silenced noninvasively, using a light source outside the skull. This makes it possible to do long-term studies without an implanted light source. The protein, known as Jaws, also allows a larger volume of tissue to be influenced at once.

This noninvasive approach could pave the way to using optogenetics in human patients to treat epilepsy and other neurological disorders, the researchers say, although much more testing and development is needed. Led by Ed Boyden, an associate professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, the researchers described the protein in the June 29 issue of Nature Neuroscience.

Optogenetics, a technique developed over the past 15 years, has become a common laboratory tool for shutting off or stimulating specific types of neurons in the brain, allowing neuroscientists to learn much more about their functions.

The neurons to be studied must be genetically engineered to produce light-sensitive proteins known as opsins, which are channels or pumps that influence electrical activity by controlling the flow of ions in or out of cells. Researchers then insert a light source, such as an optical fiber, into the brain to control the selected neurons.

Such implants can be difficult to insert, however, and can be incompatible with many kinds of experiments, such as studies of development, during which the brain changes size, or of neurodegenerative disorders, during which the implant can interact with brain physiology. In addition, it is difficult to perform long-term studies of chronic diseases with these implants.

Mining nature's diversity

To find a better alternative, Boyden, graduate student Amy Chuong, and colleagues turned to the natural world. Many microbes and other organisms use opsins to detect light and react to their environment. Most of the natural opsins now used for optogenetics respond best to blue or green light.

Boyden's team had previously identified two light-sensitive chloride ion pumps that respond to red light, which can penetrate deeper into living tissue. However, these molecules, found in the bacteria Haloarcula marismortui and Haloarcula vallismortis, did not induce a strong enough photocurrent -- an electric current in response to light -- to be useful in controlling neuron activity.

Chuong set out to improve the photocurrent by looking for relatives of these proteins and testing their electrical activity. She then engineered one of these relatives by making many different mutants. The result of this screen, Jaws, retained its red-light sensitivity but had a much stronger photocurrent -- enough to shut down neural activity.

"This exemplifies how the genomic diversity of the natural world can yield powerful reagents that can be of use in biology and neuroscience," says Boyden, who is a member of MIT's Media Lab and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Using this opsin, the researchers were able to shut down neuronal activity in the mouse brain with a light source outside the animal's head. The suppression occurred as deep as 3 millimeters in the brain, and was just as effective as that of existing silencers that rely on other colors of light delivered via conventional invasive illumination.

A key advantage to this opsin is that it could enable optogenetic studies of animals with larger brains, says Garret Stuber, an assistant professor of psychiatry and cell biology and physiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"In animals with larger brains, people have had difficulty getting behavior effects with optogenetics, and one possible reason is that not enough of the tissue is being inhibited," he says. "This could potentially alleviate that."

Restoring vision

Working with researchers at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Switzerland, the MIT team also tested Jaws's ability to restore the light sensitivity of retinal cells called cones. In people with a disease called retinitis pigmentosa, cones slowly atrophy, eventually causing blindness.

Friedrich Miescher Institute scientists Botond Roska and Volker Busskamp have previously shown that some vision can be restored in mice by engineering those cone cells to express light-sensitive proteins. In the new paper, Roska and Busskamp tested the Jaws protein in the mouse retina and found that it more closely resembled the eye's natural opsins and offered a greater range of light sensitivity, making it potentially more useful for treating retinitis pigmentosa.

This type of noninvasive approach to optogenetics could also represent a step toward developing optogenetic treatments for diseases such as epilepsy, which could be controlled by shutting off misfiring neurons that cause seizures, Boyden says. "Since these molecules come from species other than humans, many studies must be done to evaluate their safety and efficacy in the context of treatment," he says.

Boyden's lab is working with many other research groups to further test the Jaws opsin for other applications. The team is also seeking new light-sensitive proteins and is working on high-throughput screening approaches that could speed up the development of such proteins.

The research at MIT was funded by Jerry and Marge Burnett, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Human Frontiers Science Program, the IET A. F. Harvey Prize, the Janet and Sheldon Razin '59 Fellowship of the MIT McGovern Institute, the New York Stem Cell Foundation-Robertson Investigator Award, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation.

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Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Anne Trafton. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.