For the first aim, we will use the techniques of a narrative review, based on published meta-analyses of alcohol consumption – disease relations (for an overview see [7]). For the second aim, we will examine the Comparative Risk Assessment (CRA) estimates [5;8], applied to the latest available revision of Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study[9]. As these estimates were conducted by our group [5;8], we can go back to the original data for further analyses and present outcomes by level of economic development and drinking pattern (for an overview on economic development and alcohol consumption see [10;11]; for an earlier use the classification see [12]). The 2000 CRA for NCD except for ischemic heart disease was based on combining alcohol exposure with risk relations derived from meta-analyses [8]. For ischemic heart disease, for high-income countries, the meta-analysis of Corrao et al. [13]was used, whereas for the rest of the world multi-level modelling of aggregate data was used to incorporate both the effects of average volume of alcohol consumption and patterns of drinking[8;14].
