Evaluation of the impact of alcohol control policies on morbidity and mortality in Lithuania and other Baltic states
- Project No.: 1R01AA028224
- Principal investigator (LSMU): Mindaugas Štelemėkas
- Project coordinator: The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada
- Funding programme: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
- Total project value: 1 990 998,00 USD
- Part of the project value allocated to the LSMU: 832 012,00 USD
- Project duration: from 2020-04-10 to 2025-03-31
- Project website: www.who.int/europe
Summary:
A 5-year project “Evaluation of the impact of alcohol control policies on morbidity and mortality in Lithuania and other Baltic states” has been awarded by the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse (NIAAA) of the National Institutes of Health and Alcoholism in April 2020 (award number 1R01AA028224). It is co-led by Prof. Jürgen Rehm (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Canada) and Prof. Mindaugas Štelemėkas (Lithuanian University of health Sciences, Lithuania), and in total involved over 30 researchers from Baltic countries, Canada, Poland, Germany, Australia.
The project has three main aims:
- To measure the effectiveness of the alcohol control policy interventions implemented in Lithuania between 2016 and 2018.
- To measure the return on investment of the alcohol control policy interventions implemented in Lithuania between 2016 and 2018.
- To compare the trends in alcohol-attributable harm in Lithuania with surrounding countries for the years 2010-2020.
Lithuania is a country in Eastern Europe that is unique with respect to the short timeframe involved in its implementation of alcohol control policies, and has the additional advantage of allowing for generalizations to be made to other high-income countries, such as the US, as it is a high-income country, part of the European Union, and integrated in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with a comparable life expectancy to other Western high-income countries. In order to control for differences in population composition, we will perform, wherever possible, all analyses by age and sex (which will be possible for all mortality and morbidity outcomes).
Since 1993, alcohol consumption in Lithuania has more than doubled, starting from 6.2 litres pure alcohol per capita and reaching more than 15 litres in 2016. Similarly, the number of current drinkers has also increased considerably, from 55% in 1993 to 80% in 2016. Between January 1, 2016, and January 1, 2018, Lithuania implemented one more round of far-reaching alcohol control policy interventions, including all three of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) “best buys” for alcohol (increase in taxation, reduction of availability of alcoholic beverages and a ban on advertisement, and those policies were under investigation at this project.
