[Analysis of mortality in Russian population].

Abrupt mortality growth in Russian population began in 1991 and continued until 1994. Mortality lowered between 1994 and 1998, after which its fast growth resumed. These fluctuations to a significant degree result from increases and decreases in mortality related to cardiovascular diseases (CVD), particularly to "other forms of acute and chronic ischemia" and "atherosclerotic heart disease", but not to myocardial infarction, the proportion of which in Russian CVD-related mortality is extremely low. At the same time, the proportion of CVD-related deaths registered as "other" and "not specified", was more than 50%. It may suggest that in Russian statistics CVD-related mortality is overestimated, while mortality related to external causes (EC) associated with alcohol intoxication is underestimated. Analysis of forensic postmortems supports this assumption. The authors found that ethanol was very often revealed in the blood of persons with a diagnosis of "other causes" or "non-specified" CVD. On the average, in more than 20% of postmortems ethanol blood levels were potentially or actually lethal, i.e. in fact, the reason for death was alcohol intoxication, not CVD. In persons with a postmortal diagnosis of EC the frequency of ethanol detection was also very high (55 to 70%). Potentially and actually lethal ethanol concentrations were found in one third of all men and women with a postmortal diagnosis of EC. Thus, the authors of the article stress that official statistical data, according to which 65199 or 2.8% of all deaths in Russia in 2004 were caused by alcohol intoxication are in contradiction with their data and data of other authors. The results of the present study demonstrate that alcohol intoxication due to its overuse is an important reason for extreme mortality rate in Russian population.