American deaths from this alcohol-linked disease have doubled in 20 years
Alcohol-related liver disease deaths in the U.S. have roughly doubled between 1999 and 2022, with a significant increase during and after the Covid -19 pandemic, according to a group of physicians.
Mortality rates from alcohol-associated liver disease surged from 6.7 to 12.5 deaths per 100,000 people during the studied period, with a higher annual increase among women and concerning trends among young people.
American Indian or Alaska Native populations experienced the highest death rates, increasing from approximately 25 to nearly 47 per 100,000 between 1999 and 2022.
Mortality rates surged an annual average of 9 percent from 2018 to 2022, attributed to pandemic-related stressors like financial insecurity and social isolation, leading to increased drinking.
The findings indicate an urgent need for enhanced screening, improved addiction treatment access, and targeted interventions for high-risk groups, doctors say.
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Within this section, you will also find data on your exposure to sound levels in your environment if you have an Apple Watch, and headphone audio levels if you wear AirPods. 5. Using AirPods as a hearing aid If the AirPods Pro 2 (USB-C) detects hearing loss, it's also possible to set these wireless headphones up as hearing aids. You can either use the hearing test results or audiogram data from a hearing healthcare professional to set up the AirPods Pro 2 for your specific requirements. Crystal Rolfe told us that 'at the moment, there are about two million hearing aid users in the UK, but we think about eight million could benefit from one, so there's a gap of six million people in the UK alone with undiagnosed hearing loss and not using anything'. The hearing aid feature is only designed to help those with mild to moderate hearing loss. If this is detected during the test, you will be prompted to set up the hearing aid in the Health App, with a button appearing under the hearing test result. There's also a feature called media assist, which may appear instead of hearing aid. This adjusts audio levels based on your results. When the hearing aid is set up, the AirPods Pro 2 helps boost external conversations and situations, as well as adjusts everything from FaceTime calls to music, in accordance with your hearing requirements. 6. Taking an ECG It's been possible to take an ECG (electrocardiogram) using an Apple Watch since the Apple Watch Series 4 was released in 2018 and you can do this on other smartwatches, too, including Samsung Galaxy watches, Garmin and Fitbits. 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It's a problem where there is a blockage in one of the arteries of the heart. The ECG measures the electrics and many decades ago, a very clever cardiologist figured out that the electrics change when there is a blockage. 'If there is a blockage in the front of the heart, some of the leads on the ECG will change, and if it's on the side, the other ones will. [The Apple Watch ECG] is only giving you an overall summary view from one angle, so it's not looking at all the different areas. It's, therefore, really tricky from looking at one angle for people to say there's nothing going on in the front or the back,' he added. 7. Tracking your walking Using the motion sensors in your iPhone and Apple Watch, a number of mobility metrics can be tracked, from walking speed and step length to walking asymmetry and stair speed. All the data is available in the Apple Health app and you can see how each metric within the mobility section has changed over time, with day, week, month, six-month and yearly views. To track your walking performance and see how you're doing on a mobility front, tap on the browse tab, followed by mobility. From here, you can dive into each metric, with detailed information on your performance and what you should be aiming for. 8. Decide what data should be prioritised You might have various health devices recording data into the Apple Health app, or another health app like Samsung Health or Google's Health Connect. I have an Apple Watch Series 10, Oura Ring 4 and the EightSleep Pod 4 tracking my sleep, for example. You can choose to prioritise which devices or apps are used for the data presented in Apple Health, which you might want to do if you think one device is more accurate than another. You may decide, for instance, that you want to use the sleep data from Oura instead of your Apple Watch and you can do the same for other metrics like heart rate or physical activity. To prioritise a third-party device on Apple Health specifically, tap on browse in the Health app, and select the metric you want to adjust, such as sleep. From here, scroll down to data sources and access, and press edit in the top-right corner. You can then move the data sources into the priority order you want by pressing and holding on the three lines to the right of each. 9. Detecting signs of sleep apnoea Sleep apnoea is thought to affect one billion people globally and is a respiratory condition where you experience repeated disruptions in your breathing while you sleep. Both Apple and Samsung added the ability to detect signs of sleep apnoea using their smartwatches in 2024. In the case of the Apple Watch I use, if you turn on the sleep apnoea notifications feature, it will look for breathing disturbances while you're sleeping and alert you if it detects consistent signs of moderate to severe sleep apnoea over 30 days. Apple clinician, Dr Asha Chesnutt, explained to us that the sleep apnoea detection feature 'looks over a 30-day period, but you only need ten nights of data for it to report out. If you have ten nights, you need 50 per cent of 10. If you sleep for 20 nights, you need 50 per cent of 20 to trigger the notification,' she said. You can view the previous month, six months or a year of your breathing disturbances data if you have slept with Apple Watch in the Apple Health app. You just need to tap on the browse tab, followed by respiratory and then breathing disturbances. 10. Keeping an eye on your vitals Apple announced an app called Vitals for Apple Watch in 2024, which monitors your heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen and sleep duration overnight. The idea is to give you a better understanding of your daily health status by establishing a typical range for each of those five health metrics while you sleep and notifying you if any are out of your normal range, be it high or low. It's a slightly different way of doing things than other smartwatches that give you a daily score based on similar data, with Samsung offering an energy score, Garmin offering a helpful feature called body battery, and Fitbit, Pixel and Oura using a daily readiness score, all of which are simpler in their approach. Outliers in your vitals can be an early indicator of sickness, but they can also be affected by factors like alcohol consumption, increased exercise, too much caffeine and recent travel. From a sickness point of view, Dr Asha Chesnutt explained to us why looking at the Vitals data can be important for your health: 'There's a pre-symptomatic phase where any respiratory virus is replicating in our body before you might have a sore throat, runny nose or whatever symptoms you are going to have'. She added that a lot of the time, you'll see subtle changes to heart rate and respiratory rate changes the night before you end up getting sick or a respiratory virus comes on. The Vitals data then acts as a good indicator to alert you to these small changes. In the Apple Health app, you can see an overview of your vitals, as well as view by day, week, month or even six months if you have been wearing an Apple Watch at night for that long. Tap on the browse tab in Apple Health, followed by vitals, to see an overview of the metrics. 11. Tracking your menstrual cycle without a subscription Many female health tracking apps require you to pay a subscription fee for more advanced data surrounding your menstrual cycle, but the Apple Health app offers some basic tracking without the need to pay any monthly costs. It isn't as comprehensive as the likes of Natural Cycles or Clue, but you can log flow, as well as plenty of other data like symptoms, sexual activity and basal body temperature. The Apple Health app will then give you information about your cycle history, which you can export as a PDF if you want to share it with your doctor, as well as flag any cycle deviations that may have appeared. Primary care physician, Dr Raj Aurora, explained to us that cycle deviations are important as they can expedite what a doctor does with this information, such as if your heart rate is higher than normal or you've been bleeding for longer than your usual cycle length. She said that 'though it might seem scary because it's giving you what the deviation is, you can act on it quite frankly'. Through Apple Health, cycle tracking can also provide a fertile window estimate based on the data you put in. If you wear an Apple Watch Series 8 or newer, the Health app is able to use your wrist temperature data to improve your period predictions and estimate the date of ovulation after it occurs. To find cycle tracking data, tap on the browse tab and head to cycle tracking.
