Potential years of life lost (PYLL) due to alcohol-related conditions - WMCA

Potential years of life lost (PYLL) due to alcohol-related conditions, all ages, directly age-standardised per 100,000 population (standardised to the ESP). ## Rationale Alcohol consumption is a contributing factor to hospital admissions and deaths from a diverse range of conditions. Alcohol misuse is estimated to cost the NHS about £3.5 billion per year and society as a whole £21 billion annually. The Government has said that everyone has a role to play in reducing the harmful use of alcohol - this indicator is one of the key contributions by the Government (and the Department of Health and Social Care) to promote measurable, evidence-based prevention activities at a local level, and supports the national ambitions to reduce harm set out in the Government's Alcohol Strategy. This ambition is part of the monitoring arrangements for the Responsibility Deal Alcohol Network. Alcohol-related deaths can be reduced through local interventions to reduce alcohol misuse and harm. Potential years of life lost (PYLL) is a measure of the potential number of years lost when a person dies prematurely. The basic concept of PYLL is that deaths at younger ages are weighted more heavily than those at older ages. The advantage in doing this is that deaths at younger ages may be seen as less important if cause-specific death rates were just used on their own in highlighting the burden of disease and injury, since conditions such as cancer and heart disease usually occur at older ages and have relatively high mortality rates. To enable comparisons between areas and over time, PYLL rates are age-standardised to represent the PYLL if each area had the same population structure as the 2013 European Standard Population (ESP). PYLL rates are presented as years of life lost per 100,000 population. ## Definition of numerator The number of age-specific alcohol-related deaths multiplied by the national life expectancy for each age group and summed to give the total potential years of life lost due to alcohol-related conditions. ## Definition of denominator ONS Mid-Year Population Estimates aggregated into quinary age bands. ## Caveats There is the potential for the underlying cause of death to be incorrectly attributed on the death certificate and the cause of death misclassified. Alcohol-attributable fractions were not available for children. Conditions where low levels of alcohol consumption are protective (have a negative alcohol-attributable fraction) are not included in the calculation of the indicator. The national life expectancies for England have been used for all sub-national geographies to illustrate the disparities in the burden caused by alcohol between local areas and the national average. The confidence intervals do not take into account the uncertainty involved in the calculation of the AAFs – that is, the proportion of deaths that are caused by alcohol and the alcohol consumption prevalence that are included in the AAF formula are only an estimate and so include uncertainty. The confidence intervals published here are based only on the observed number of deaths and do not account for this uncertainty in the calculation of attributable fraction - as such the intervals may be too narrow.