Our study benefits from a thorough consideration of trends in alcohol-induced death rates across individual population subgroups using the full US population older than 15 years. Previous studies have described US mortality trends but focused on certain causes. For example, in 2018, Tapper and Parikh34 described mortality due to cirrhosis and liver cancer, and several studies have examined the association of alcoholic liver disease and alcohol-induced deaths in rising rates of premature mortality in the United States.2,3,5 We included all causes of death known definitively to be induced by alcohol, providing an unambiguous measure of deaths of which alcohol is the sole cause.35 Furthermore, we have examined how trends differed by sex, race/ethnicity, age, county-level SES, and geographic location. To improve accessibility, we have predominantly presented our results graphically, including displaying uncertainty surrounding our joinpoint estimates.
