Mortality among alcoholics discharged from a Japanese hospital.

A study of mortality among alcoholics was carried out involving patients discharged from the alcoholic ward of a Hamamatsu University-affiliated hospital from 1972 to 1984 (1021 patients). The average age at death was 48.4 years. The causes of death were divided into three groups; 'diseases', 'accidents', 'suicide and homicide', accounting for 73.5%, 10.5% and 7.3% of 257 deaths, respectively. Death rates per 1000 persons for the years at risk were compared with the expected rates for the general population. Briefly, the death rates for patients were more than 10 times as large as those in the general population. Our results showed that liver cirrhosis and heart failure ranked high among the causes of death in alcoholics. Among patients who died, only 3.1% were total abstainers after discharge from hospital, which was an extremely low proportion in comparison with the average cross-total abstinence rate of 25.8% among patients after discharge.