Alcohol related harm in Slovenia

Background: Alcohol consumption is one of the major avoidable risk factors for chronic diseases, injuries and violence. Overall there is a causal relationship between alcohol consumption and more than 60 types of disease and injury. For some of them alcohol is the only possible cause and so they are wholly (100 %) attributable to alcohol. Methods: We have analysed the data on mortality and hospitalisation of Slovenian citizens because of causes wholly attributable to alcohol. We used mortality and hospitalisation data from the National Institute of Public Health’s healthcare databases »Database of Death certificates« and »Data on in-hospital treatments for diseases, injuries and poisoning«. We present the situation in Slovenia in the period from 2007 to 2009 with gender and regional differences analysis. With the mortality data for the period from 2004 to 2008 we also present the impact of socio-economic differences on the mortality wholly attributable to alcohol consumption in Slovenia. For bivariate analysis of the connection between variables we used Chi-square test. Results: In the period from 2007 to 2009 there were on average 811 deaths, of which 509 were premature (4.4 % of all deaths and 12.3 % of all premature deaths), 3799 hospitalisations and 90,589 hospital days (1.3 % of all hospitalisations and 3.8 % of all hospital days in the country in a calendar year) because of causes wholly attributable to alcohol in Slovenia. Men have higher relative risk for death and for hospitalisation because of causes wholly attributable to alcohol than women, and also residents of Eastern Slovenia have higher relative risk than residents of Western Slovenia. Wholly alcohol-attributable mortality is the biggest among residents of the least developed municipalities and is decreasing with the increase of municipality development. Conclusions: Hazardous and harmful alcohol consumption is a big public health problem in Slovenia and it contributes to health inequalities, so activities to reduce its consequences should be increased.