Addiction, Author Interviews, Gender Differences, Mental Health Research, Opiods / 28.07.2017
Drug-Related Deaths Among Whites Soar But Alcohol and Suicide Mortality Stable
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Andrea M. Tilstra
Doctoral Student, Department of Sociology
Population Program, Institute of Behavioral Science
University of Colorado Boulder and
Ryan K. Masters
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Faculty Associate, Population Program and Health & Society Program
Institute of Behavioral Science
University of Colorado Boulder
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: “Despair” deaths – deaths from suicides, alcohol poisonings, and drug overdoses – have been a topic of interest in recent mortality research. For instance, existing findings suggest that mortality among white Americans has increased as a result of middle-aged whites experiencing elevated levels of despair and distress. These factors supposedly are driving white Americans to cope in unhealthy ways – excessive drinking, drug use, and suicides.
However, there were two major problems with the existing research that supported this narrative. First, men and women were analyzed together, despite the knowledge that overall mortality levels and trends differ significantly by gender. Second, all three of the aforementioned causes of death were pooled together and analyzed as one group. This is highly problematic if deaths from suicides, alcohol use, and drug use are not, in fact, moving in conjunction with one another. We addressed these issues and expanded previous analyses by analyzing cause-specific death rates for men and women separately, for years 1980-2014, and decomposing the trends into period- and cohort- based analyses.
We find that there are huge gender differences in U.S. white mortality rates and that trends in mortality from the three causes of death are quite distinct from one another. Recent increases in U.S. white mortality are largely driven by period-based increases in drug poisoning deaths and cohort-based increases in metabolic disease deaths.
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