Ethnicity, distilled spirits consumption and mortality in Pennsylvania.

Svaa,a¾. Among Whites residing in Pennsylvania, those born in or who had at least one parent born in a foreign country drank relatively large proportions o)  distilled spirits and had relatively high rates o)  death due to alcoholic liver cirrhosis and stomach cancer. In the epidemiology of alcohol-related health problems, one postulate that has recently gained increased attention is that the per-capita alcohol consumption of a population is predictive of the prevalence of alcohol problems as indexed by mortality attributable to liver cirrhosis (1). Its critics have pointed out (2), however, that the over-all per-capita con- sumption may mask or obscure heavy drinking by particular subpopula- tions. The purpose of the present paper was to assess the impact of alcohol consumption by White immigrants on site-specific mortality. Previous research (3, 4) has revealed associations between alcohol consumption, cancers of the upper alimentary tract and liver cirrhosis. Recent studies (5, 6) have found that some groups who immigrated more recently to the United States have a higher per-capita consumption of alcohol than do descendants of persons who immigrated earlier, suggesting that ethnicity may explain, in part, the relationship between per-capita consumption and site-specific mortality. We examined the relationships between ethnicity, alcohol consumption and mortality, and then considered the implications of these findings for the distribution-of-consumption model of prevention of alcohol problems. A basic proposal of this model is that reduction or stabilization of alcohol problems in a population can be accomplished by reducing or stabilizing the per-capita alcohol consumption (7, 8).