Alcohol surrogate poisoning: statistics for the country and individual regions

Abstract

Alcohol abuse around the world is a risk factor for death and disability, so the problem of mortality due to excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages is extremely urgent. Alcoholism is widespread among people of different nationalities, and is part of the lifestyle of people of different sex and age. The risk of death regardless of the cause increases with an increase in alcohol addiction. People who abuse alcohol are at high risk for cognitive impairment, tendency to depression and anxiety, and have many co-morbidities. Alcoholic beverages can act as both an initiator of harm to oneself or another person as well as a cause of premature death, such as poisonings of chemical etiology, which include: poisonings from medications, drugs, alcohol and its surrogates. Toxic alcohols are readily available and contained in many household and industrial products, so mass poisonings with surrogate alcohol are registered almost every month in the Russian Federation. The aim of the literature review was to analyze the statistics and identify the connection between the excessive consumption of alcohol and its surrogates and the high mortality rates in the Russian Federation and individual regions. To achieve our goal, we had to solve a number of tasks. To begin with, we collected literature for the period 2012-2022 on this problem from the main biomedical information sources, such as PuBMed and eLIBRARY.RU. Next, we reviewed the mortality statistics of the Russian Federation and, in particular, the Omsk region for the period 2012-2022. Then we evaluated the correlation between the excessive consumption of alcohol-containing products and high mortality. We went deeper into the study of this problem and analyzed the correlation between the mortality rate and alcohol detection during the examination and mortality from other somatic diseases. We evaluated the frequency of acute poisonings of chemical nature, namely fatal poisonings of alcohol etiology. We identified the most frequent chemical that provoked the fatal outcome. We also considered the risk of mortality in relation to gender and age.