California State University, Northridge mathematics professor Maria D’Orsogna is hoping that the recent study she and her colleagues did on alcohol-related deaths in the United States will serve as a resource for policymakers and community members working to reduce alcohol-related harm.

The report breaks down data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by race, sex, age, geography and the COVID-19 pandemic. Their findings were sobering. Alcohol-induced deaths nearly doubled from 1999 to 2024, with the highest number of alcohol-related deaths occurring during the pandemic. Deaths among women aged 25 to 34 years old rose by 255 percent while deaths among men aged 25 to 34 years old rose by 188 percent.

“While overall alcohol-induced deaths remain higher among males, the crude rates are rising faster among females across all demographics, which is a concerning trend,” said D’Orsogna, who teaches in CSUN’s College of Science and Mathematics. “Sharp increases occurred at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, peaking in 2021. For most of the demographics across the nation, crude rates remained abnormally high throughout 2023. Significant decreases emerged only in 2024, four years after the start of the pandemic.”

The data, particularly as it is presented in the report in simple yet concise graphs, tells the story of what is happening in the United States when it comes to alcohol-related deaths, D’Orsogna said.

“Anybody can access the information — it’s collected by the CDC and it’s public —  but the data may not always be fully utilized” she said. “We wanted to present it in a visual way, coupling it with statistical methods so, that the public can have an immediate sense of what the data means and hopefully inspire the development of programs or policies that can effectively target affected populations.”

The study, “Alcohol-induced deaths in the United States across age, race, gender, geography, and the COVID-19 pandemic,” was published last year in PLOS Global Public Health. In addition to D’Orsogna, the study’s authors include Tony Wong with the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles; Lucas Böttcher with the Department of Computational Science and Philosophy at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Germany and the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida, Gainesville; and Tom Chou with the Department of Computational Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The researchers analyzed national death records covering 14 specific alcohol-related causes. Most of the deaths were linked to alcohol-related liver disease and alcohol-related mental and behavioral disorders. They looked at data from 1999 to 2024.

Alcohol-induced deaths have been increasing over the past two decades. Particularly concerning, D’Orsogna said, were the increases between 2019 and 2021, when the American population retreated into isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic and people with alcohol-use disorders were less able to access treatment.

D’Orsogna noted that by 2024, alcohol-related fatalities had declined compared to the pandemic years, but the average alcohol-induced mortality rate across U.S. counties remained approximately 25 percent higher than in 2019.

“Qualifying mortality trends and determining whether alcohol-induced deaths have returned to pre-pandemic levels is essential for understanding long-term temporal patterns and dynamics,” she said.

The researchers found that the largest overall increase in alcohol-induced mortality across all race, sex, age groups occurred in 2021, when fatalities peaked at 54,258 deaths overall.

Fatal drug overdoses tend to receive more attention compared to alcohol deaths, due to the urgency of the opioid crisis and especially during the pandemic. However, alcohol is linked to several chronic diseases that cause a comparable, and in some cases even greater, number of deaths, D’Orsogna said.

American Indian/Alaska Native populations (AIAN) remained the most affected, with male AIAN rates of alcohol-induced mortality three times higher than that of white males, and female AIAN mortality rates four times higher than that of white females, over the entire 25-year period of investigation.

The largest increase by demographic was among females aged 25 to 34, which rose from 0.9 deaths per 100,000 in 1999 to 3.2 per 100,000 in 2024 — a 255 percent increase. The second largest increase was in males aged 25-34, from 2.3 fatalities per 100,000 in 1999 to 6.5 in 2024 — a 188 percent increase.

In addition to race, sex and age, the study breaks the data down by state and county, with detailed graphs and maps illustrating alcohol-induced rates across the United States.

D’Orsogna noted that deaths from chronic diseases related to alcohol use, such as certain cancers or cardiovascular events, were not included in this study. “Which means the overall fatality counts may be underestimated,” she said. “These findings underscore the critical need for targeted policies to reduce excessive alcohol consumption and improve access to treatment for those who need it most.