Vodka blamed for high number of early deaths in Russia

25 per cent of Russian men die before they are 55, study
reports

he nation's much-loved tipple is a major cause of early death in Russia and has a direct impact on mortality rates in men, new research shows.

The study, published in medical journal The Lancet, says 25 per cent of Russian men die before they are 55 and that most of these deaths are attributable to alcohol consumption. This figure compares to 7 per cent in the UK and less than 1 per cent in the United States.

Over the past 30 years, there has been a positive correlation between the easier availability of vodka and premature death statistics, say scientists.

The study shows that Russian men who drink three or more bottles of vodka a week are 35 per cent more likely to go to an early grave than those who consume less than one.

"Russian death rates have fluctuated wildly over the past 30 years as alcohol restrictions and social stability varied under Presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin, and the main thing driving these wild fluctuations in death was vodka," said study co-author Professor Sir Richard Peto, from Oxford University.

"This has been shown in retrospective studies, and now we've confirmed it in a big, reliable prospective study."

Researchers from the Russian Cancer Centre in Moscow, Oxford University in the UK and the World Health Organization International Agency for Research on Cancer, in France, tracked about 151,000 adult men in the Russian cities of Barnaul, Byisk and Tomsk from 1999 to 2010.

They interviewed them about their drinking habits and, when 8,000 of these men later died, followed up to monitor their causes of death.

source: http://www.independent.co.uk/