A

ALCOHOL-RELATED TEENAGE DEATHS: UNITED STATES, 1980

Alcohol and Premature Death

In 1985, two letter writers to the Journal of the American Medical Association used 1980 data from the National Center for Health Statistics to call attention to the premature deaths of American teenagers from the abuse of alcohol. The authors studied the deaths of persons ten to nineteen years of age in 1980 whose death certificates showed alcohol as an underlying or contributing cause of death.

Deaths from Alcohol Abuse

They found eight deaths in persons younger than fifteen years old. The youngest child, a twelve-year-old girl, died of exposure to the weather. From fifteen to nineteen years of age there were 276 deaths. Fifty-two deaths were because of alcohol abuse without trauma, including 9 from aspiration of food, 7 from exposure, and 3 with acute pancreatitis. The remaining deaths from trauma, by cause and number, were: motor vehicle accidents, 126; drowning, 32; shooting, 26; stabbing, 7; carbon monoxide inhalation, 7; hanging, 6; drugs or poisoning by chemicals, 6; falls from heights, 5; fire, 4; and "other," 5.

Alcohol Deaths Underestimated and Underreported

The authors concluded that deaths associated with alcohol abuse were still vastly underestimated and underreported. A study in San Francisco in 1985 showed alcohol blood levels legally defined as intoxicated in 50 percent of persons aged twelve to twenty-four years who died after accidents. In 1980, among persons fifteen to nineteen years of age, there were 10,663 deaths in the United States from motor vehicle accidents alone. If 50 percent were associated with intoxication, one would expect about 5,000 such deaths in comparison with only 126 observed in the study.