Women started dying from alcohol consumption at a “significantly higher rate” in the U.S. in the three years heading into COVID-19, a study found.
Four researchers published the study Friday in JAMA Network Open. They analyzed the government database records of 605,948 Americans who died of alcohol poisoning, alcoholic liver disease, acute intoxication, and mental and behavioral disorders related to alcohol abuse from 1999 to 2020.
The study found alcohol-related deaths increased among both sexes over the entire period, with men 2.88 times as likely to die as women.
But it found deaths began accelerating faster among women than men in the last three years heading into the pandemic, narrowing a historical gap in drinking habits between the sexes.
From 2018 to 2020, alcohol-related deaths increased annually by an average of 14.7% among women compared with a 12.5% yearly increase for men.
“It is possible that rising alcohol consumption rates and increasing obesity rates among women could be contributing factors,” Ismaeel Yunusa, a co-author of the study and pharmacy professor at the University of South Carolina, told The Washington Times.
“Further research is needed to explain the rise in alcohol-related deaths among women since the study did not examine the reasons for the trend,” Mr. Yunusa added.
These findings echo other recent reports that more women are drinking and suffering related harms, said George F. Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
He said the study adds to “accumulating evidence” suggesting that hangovers, blackouts, liver inflammation, cirrhosis of the liver, and alcohol-related heart disease and cancer put women at greater risk of death than men.
“Because of differences in physiology, women tend to reach higher blood alcohol levels after the same amount of alcohol as a similarly sized male,” Mr. Koob, a behavioral physiologist specializing in alcohol and drug addiction, said in an email.
It’s unclear why women have started drinking more heavily in recent years, he added.
“The changes seem to reflect widespread cultural shifts over the last century,” said Mr. Koob, who was not involved in the study. “For instance, alcohol use among women has simply become more accepted and normalized over time.”
Those cultural changes have driven a rise in “deaths of despair” among women that mirrors the decline of traditional institutions such as religion and family, said Ray Guarendi, a family psychologist and author based in Canton, Ohio.
“Once you pull away these core socializing guardrails and make people radically autonomous, psychologically you pull them into a crisis of meaning,” Mr. Guarendi told The Times. “Women are at an all-time high for anxiety and depression, so it’s no surprise that more of them self-medicate.”
According to the study, alcohol mortality rates jumped even higher once researchers added data from 2020 to the mix, reflecting the impact of the first year of pandemic lockdowns.
The study found that alcohol-related mortality among both sexes increased by an average of 3.8% per year from 2011 to 2019 and shot up to 14.1% annually from 2018 to 2020.
Alcohol-related deaths for men experienced no annual change from 1999 to 2009, then grew at an annual rate of 3% from 2009 to 2018 and 12.5% from 2018 to 2020.
By comparison, the rate of alcohol-related deaths for women snowballed over the entire period studied. Alcohol deaths among women increased by 1% a year from 1999 to 2007, rose by 4.3% a year from 2007 to 2018 and finally surged by 14.7% a year from 2018 to 2020.
Among those under 60, deaths increased faster for men than for women in recent years. But from 2012 to 2020, they rose at a higher annual rate for women (6.7%) than for men (5.2%) older than 65.
The study did not include data for women ages 15 to 24, citing “limited and unreliable data counts.”
It’s impossible to blame COVID alone for the recent surge in alcohol-fueled deaths, said Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security who was not involved in the study.
“While there has been some impact of the COVID pandemic on alcohol-related issues documented, the authors of this study used statistical tools and showed that the trend they discovered was present even when the pandemic year was excluded from the analysis,” Dr. Adalja said in an email.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
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