Development of the International Alcohol Policy and Injury Index.

OBJECTIVE

The current work develops the International Alcohol Policy Injury Index (IAPII) to measure the effectiveness of control policies that impact reduction of alcohol-related injury.

METHODS

Using cross-sectional data on alcohol policies from five policy domains ( and ), injury death, and alcohol-attributable fractions (AAFs) for vehicular deaths were accessed from the WHO database for 156 countries. A composite indicator, the International Alcohol Policy Injury Index (IAPII), was created to assess the association between policy and death due to injury.

FINDINGS

Controlling for per-capita alcohol consumption, injury deaths and AAF deaths were inversely associated with four of the five policy domains. The domains were weighted according to effectiveness and used to construct the IAPII which produced acceptable sensitivity and specificity. Regression results, controlling for consumption, demonstrated the IAPII was significantly associated with AAF vehicular injury death for males, AAF vehicular injury death for females and overall injury death at < 0.01.

CONCLUSION

Findings support the IAPII as a reliable indicator of the relationship between alcohol policies and injury deaths; the stronger the policy the less the likelihood of both overall and vehicular injury death. Future work should test the effectiveness of the IAPII in reducing alcohol-related injury morbidity, which accounts for a larger share of the global burden of disease than alcohol-related injury mortality.