Cirrhosis mortality in California--a trend.

The recorded California death experience attributable to cirrhosis of the liver for the period 1910-1957 was collected and analyzed. The analysis clearly demonstrated a progressive increase in age-adjusted death rates for the past thirty-five years, paralleled by a constantly decreasing average age at death. Increasingly, California citizens are dying of cirrhosis of the liver at younger ages. At a time when diagnosis and treatment of cirrhosis of the liver are at their highest points of clinical interest and concern, this analysis suggests that other morbid forces are at work in the production of liver cirrhosis that must be ferreted out by clinicians and epidemiologists.