Alcohol-related deaths in UK hit record high of 10,473, ONS data shows
Alcohol-related deaths in the UK have hit a record high, with 10,473 people dying in 2023 as a result of heavy drinking, statistics have revealed.
That is an increase on the 10,048 deaths the Office for National Statistics recorded across the four countries of the UK during 2022, the first time more than 10,000 such fatalities had occurred.
Health experts said the figures were heartbreaking and tragic and the result of a surge in problematic consumption that began during the Covid lockdowns in 2020. They urged ministers to do more to tackle drinking-related harm, including bringing in minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol.
'Today's figures paint a bleak picture of the ongoing harm caused by alcohol across the UK. It is unacceptable that year after year, we continue to see alcohol deaths rise while action from government remains woefully inadequate,' said Prof Sir Ian Gilmore, the chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance, a coalition of 60 medical groups, charities and treatment providers.
Ministers should get tough on 'cheap, easily accessible alcohol and [the] aggressive marketing that normalises excessive drinking', he added.
The number of people drinking at hazardous levels – above the UK chief medical officers' recommendations of 14 units a week – is increasing every year, the charity Alcohol Change UK said. It highlighted multiple health issues caused by alcohol, from headaches and sleeping problems to high blood pressure, anxiety and cancer.
Ash Singleton, the charity's director of research and public affairs, said the ONS figures did not include the 'thousands' more deaths in 2023 that were caused by conditions in which alcohol was a significant factor, including cardiovascular disease, mental illness and cancer.
Explaining its figures, the ONS said: 'Alcohol-specific deaths only includes those health conditions where each death is a direct consequence of alcohol – that is, wholly attributable causes such as alcoholic liver disease. It does not include all deaths that can be attributed to alcohol.'
The ONS figures also showed:
• Men are more than twice as likely as women to die as a result of excess alcohol consumption, continuing a long-established trend.
• Scotland and Northern Ireland had higher rates of alcohol-related deaths than England or Wales.
• In England, the north-east had the highest rate of deaths – 25.7 per 100,000 people – and the east of England the lowest rate at 11.5 per 100,000 people.
The ONS data also showed that, although the number of alcohol-related deaths was the highest ever, the rate at which they occurred UK-wide actually fell, from 16.6 per 100,000 people in 2022 to 15.9 per 100,000 in 2023. However, the rate rose last year in both England and Wales to 15 and 17.7 per 100,000 respectively.
Alcohol deaths remain more common in Scotland and Northern Ireland, as they have been for years. Rates there in 2023 were higher – at 22.6 and 18.5 per 100,000 respectively.
Responding to the figures, Dr Katherine Severi, the chief executive of the Institute of Alcohol Studies, said: 'We've seen record-high deaths from alcohol in the UK every single year since the pandemic. This simply cannot become the new normal, so the government must make tackling alcohol harm a top priority in 2025.
'For the government's growth and health missions to succeed, we need measures that are proven effective at reducing alcohol harm. Minimum unit pricing for alcohol has reduced alcohol-specific deaths by 13% in Scotland, with the greatest benefits seen among the most disadvantaged communities.'
Among the new policies needed, 'MUP for England is the top priority, as it would save the most lives the quickest', Severi said.
She added: 'Alcohol kills people young, depriving thousands of families across the UK of their loved ones far too soon. From an economic perspective this places a strain on our productivity, with 150,000 years of working life lost due to alcohol in 2023 in England alone.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
6 hours ago
FDA expands warning label for COVID-19 vaccines
The Food and Drug Administration finalized the expansion of heart risk warning labels on Moderna and Pfizer's mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Dr. Alok Patel has more medical news to share.
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Yahoo
Why bad dreams could be aging and prematurely killing you
Nightmares can literally scare the life out of people, new research suggests. Frequent unpleasant dreams and nightmares are being linked with accelerated biological aging and an untimely death. According to a British team, people who experience weekly distressing dreams are three times more likely to die before they reach age 70 than people who rarely or never report experiencing nightmares. Researchers said the finding held even after they accounted for smoking, obesity, unhealthy diets and other risk factors for an early death. The study can't prove causation — that nightmares are premature killers. However, one theory implicates the stress hormone cortisol. Higher levels of cortisol are associated with shorter telomeres, tiny caps at the end of chromosomes, like the tip of a shoelace. Telomeres get shorter every time a cell divides, and shorter telomeres are considered a sign of accelerated aging of the body's cells. Cortisol is present at high levels during nightmares. 'For those who frequently experience nightmares, this cumulative stress may significantly impact the aging process,' the study's lead author, Dr. Abidemi Otaiku, of the UK Dementia Research Institute and Imperial College London, said in a statement released this week. What's more, nightmares mess with how well and how long people sleep, 'impairing the body's essential overnight cellular restoration and repair,' Otaiku said. 'The combined effects of chronic stress and disrupted sleep likely contribute to the accelerated aging of our cells and bodies.' Nightmares are common, Otaiku reported in earlier work linking nightmares with an increased risk of dementia and cognitive decline in middle-aged adults. About five percent of adults experience nightmares weekly, and up to 40 percent monthly, percentages that are likely even higher if bad dreams are thrown in, he said. Considering how common a phenomenon nightmares are, 'it is surprising that their clinical significance remains largely unknown,' he wrote. In the latest study, presented this week at the European Academy of Neurology Congress in Helsinki, Otaiku and colleagues analyzed pooled data from 2,429 children aged eight to 10, and 183,012 adults aged 26 to 86 from six cohort studies following large groups of people over time. Adults reported how often they had nightmares at the start of the study, and were followed for up to 19 years. For kids, nightmare frequency was reported by parents. According to a release, adults reporting weekly nightmares were three times as likely to die prematurely than people who rarely or never experienced distressing dreams. 'Children and adults with more frequent nightmares also exhibited faster biological aging, which accounted for approximately 40 percent of the heightened mortality risk' among adults, according to the release. Even people who reported monthly nightmares showed signs of faster aging and a higher mortality, 'Our sleeping brains cannot distinguish dreams from reality,' Otaiku said. 'That's why nightmares often wake us up sweating, gasping for breath and with our hearts pounding — because our fight-or-flight response has been triggered. 'This stress reaction can be more intense than anything we experience while awake.' While it's all enough to lose sleep over, more research is needed to confirm the associations. Hormones are just one factor in accelerated cellular aging. In the meantime, nightmares are less likely if people avoid scary movies, manage stress and seek help for symptoms of anxiety or depression, Otaiku said. Stress can drive unpleasant dreams, University of Montreal psychologist and sleep scientist Antonio Zadra told National Post last year as part of a special series on sleep. But dreams also 'tend to embody our current concerns and preoccupations and much of what is on our minds is often negatively toned.' Worries 'get replayed in our dreams in metaphorical and disjointed ways, and the emotions underlying them get amplified,' Zadra said. Strategies to distract negative thoughts can help calm people down, he and other said, like reading a book or slowing breathing, which soothes the fight-or-flight response. National Post Millennial couples are sleeping apart to stay together. Why sleep divorce is surging Why more Canadians are landing in emergency departments with cannabis-induced vomiting Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.
Fast Company
8 hours ago
- Fast Company
Scientists engineer bacteria to turn plastic waste into painkillers
Tales of turning water into wine or weaving straw into gold are one thing, but a new study shows that scientists can transform trash into . . . Tylenol? Scientists at the University of Edinburgh were able to convert plastic waste into paracetamol, aka acetaminophen, the active ingredient in the pain reliever Tylenol. Stranger yet, they pulled off the alchemical feat using the bacteria E. coli. 'We're able to transform a prolific environmental and societal waste into such a globally important medication in a way that's completely impossible, using chemistry alone or using biology alone,' says study coauthor Stephen Wallace, a chemical biotechnologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The research team began with polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a common plastic found in food packaging and polyester clothing. Using established chemical methods, they broke down the PET plastic into a precursor molecule and then added it into a cell culture of E. coli that was genetically modified. Enzymes in the modified E. coli bacteria were able to convert the plastic precursor into paracetamol 92% of the time. The transformation relies on a chemical process known as a Lossen rearrangement, which can convert one kind of molecule into a different kind of molecule. Scientists have known about the Lossen rearrangement for more than 100 years, but generally observe the phenomenon in a flask or a test tube. The research group is now working with pharmaceutical makers including AstraZeneca, one of the study's sponsors, to replicate the same chemical transformations on a larger scale. The new research isn't the first to observe the way that bacteria can be deployed to usefully break down plastic. Researchers have previously studied how wastewater bacteria found in urban waterways use a special enzyme to chew up plastic trash and convert it into carbon-based food. As we grapple with the cascading environmental and health effects that decades of proliferating plastics have wrought on the planet, bacteria capable of converting plastic into harmless or even useful molecules is a promising area of research.
