LIVER DISEASE DEATHS SPIKE AMONG YOUNG AMERICANS

A recent study has revealed alarmingly scary results that more and more people across America, particularly youngsters, are dying due to ailments associated with liver cirrhosis. This ground-breaking new study was published in the BMJ earlier last month, and it took into account various age-related and other crucial factors to account for the rising death rates across the country.


The study revealed that since 1999 to 2016, death tolls in the US due to liver cirrhosis and related ailments has increased to an alarming 65%, and the deaths resulting from liver cancer have also doubled during this period. Moreover, the death toll induced by liver cirrhosis for nearly every ethnic group, amongst both, men and women has experienced a sharp increase during these years.

Furthermore, from 2009 to 2016, people between the ages of 25 to 34 emerged as the greatest targets of this increase in the death rates resulting from cirrhosis. These findings were shared by Dr. Elliot Tapper, an assistant professor from the University of Michigan, and the first author of this new study. She revealed that this sudden increase in cirrhosis-related death rates can be directly associated with the habit of binge-drinking amongst youngsters, which has led to an increase in cirrhosis-associated mortality.

Tapper shared that these easily preventable deaths can be reduced by taking certain precautionary measures, increasing the prices of alcoholic beverages and liquor, and using existing blood tests to provide an accurate diagnosis for liver cirrhosis. Moreover, Tapper revealed that during the past few years, he had been dealing with more and more young patients suffering from liver cirrhosis, and this led to him to create an entire research revolving around while this trend of young deaths resulting from liver cirrhosis has emerged in various different states across the country.


Liver cirrhosis refers to a condition of scarring that occurs within the liver, and this happens when harmful toxins, like excessive consumption of calories and alcohol, tend to create severe stress on the liver, leading to the onset of inflammation, which gradually develops into scarring.

Liver cirrhosis is a serious ailment that can trigger certain potentially life-threatening challenges and complications, such as the accumulation of fluid within the stomach, the development of varicose veins, and the gradual spread of toxins towards the brain, leading to a condition referred to as liver coma. This disease can also increase the risk factors of suffering from liver cancer, which happens to one of the major causes of deaths induced by cancer.

This recent study examined the publicly accessible statistics made available in the Vital Statistics Cooperative US centres of Disease Control and Prevention. They obtained data from the years 1999 up to 2016. The researchers revealed that the age-adjusted mortality of cirrhosis tends to be 12.18 for every 100,000 patients. The mortality rates rose annually by 3.4% from the years 2008 to 2016. The researchers discovered that this increase in cirrhosis mortality were the largest in Arkansas, New Mexico, and Kentucky.

This study was conducted by comparing the state-wise changes in alcohol-induced liver cirrhosis mortality with their changes in alcohol use disorder. The results revealed that many of the states that experienced increased in the numbers of alcohol-induced cirrhosis deaths also had increased rates of alcohol use disorder, and vice versa. Since this study was largely observational, the researchers could not validate whether and how these trends were related to one another.

Moreover, along with being largely an observational researcher, Dr Tapper revealed that yet another limitation of this study occurred from its use of death records, which are documents that tend to be nearly 10% possibility of being fallacious and inaccurate.

According to Dr. Farhad Islami, who serves as the scientific director of the cancer research centre at the American Cancer Society, this study reveals an extremely insightful association between the excessive consumption of alcohol and the increase in the death rates induced by liver cirrhosis amongst young people, and this study warrants further research into this subject matter.

The study revealed that the death rates amongst young people were seen to increase amongst all kinds of demographic groups, however, the number of young people dying from liver cirrhosis were considerably modest in comparison. In 2016, cirrhosis claimed nearly 1.4% of the deaths amongst youngsters between the ages of 25 to 34. Dr. Islami believes that report fallacious mortality records for this particular age group can lead to researchers falsely alarming the community with an upward trend.