Alcohol-related Deaths

Last Updated: 7 August 2009

This section presents information on the numbers of deaths which are classified as "alcohol-related" on the basis of the current definition (which was agreed with the Office for National Statistics in 2006, and is set out on the "Alcohol Related Deaths - the Coverage of the Statistics" page.

These figures do not include all deaths which some might regard as related to alcohol - for example, they do not include deaths:

• as a result of road accidents, falls, fires, suicide or violence involving people who had been drinking; or
• from some medical conditions which are considered partly attributable to alcohol, such as certain forms of cancer.

The reasons for this include the need to be able to provide reasonably consistent trends over time and for different parts of the United Kingdom (UK). The definition includes only those causes of death which are regarded as being most directly due to alcohol consumption and for which figures can be obtained from the statistics of registered deaths, due to lack of consistent statistical information about (e.g.) accidental deaths, suicides and homicides which are directly due to the consumption of alcohol.

Including appropriate proportions of deaths from causes such as road accidents and certain forms of cancer would produce considerably higher figures for alcohol-related deaths. Further information about this is available on the ISD Scotland website page “Alcohol attributable mortality and morbidity: alcohol population attributable fractions for Scotland”, published in June 2009.

A range of information is available from the death certificate (as described on the "Death Certificates and Coding the Causes of Death" page). The figures for alcohol-related deaths which are given here have been produced on the "underlying cause" basis - so they are the numbers of deaths for which the disease or injury which initiated the chain of morbid events leading directly to death (or in the accident/act which produced the fatal injury) was one of those which are listed in the definition.

It will be seen the figures for some areas can fluctuate markedly (in percentage terms) from one year to the next. As a result, 3- or 5-year moving averages (as shown in the "National Health Service (NHS) Board area" table) may provide a better guide to the underlying level, and any long-term trend, than the change between one year and the next.