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Alcohol-Linked Liver Deaths Rising in Women and Young Adults

Medically reviewed by Carmen Pope, BPharm. Last updated on June 13, 2025.

By I. Edwards HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, June 13, 2025 — Alcohol-related liver disease deaths are increasing — and they’re rising faster in some groups, including women, young adults and Indigenous people, new research shows.

Between 2018 and 2022, deaths from alcohol-associated liver disease (ALD) rose nearly 9% a year, compared to 3.5% annually between 2006 and 2018, according to a study published June 11 in JAMA Network Open.

Experts say the rise likely owes to higher drinking during the COVID-19 pandemic — as well as other long-term health problems like obesity and high blood pressure.

“It puts numbers to what we’re seeing in the hospital, in the clinic,” Dr. Brian Lee, a liver specialist at Keck Medicine of USC in Los Angeles, said in a STAT News report. He was not part of the study.

The study used death certificates from across the U.S. to track deaths from alcohol-associated hepatitis and cirrhosis, two very serious liver conditions.

While men still had the highest number of deaths — 17 per 100,000 people — women’s death rates grew faster. In 2022, 8 of every 100,000 women died from ALD, up from 3 per 100,000 over the study period. Women’s death rates rose by about 4.3% each year, nearly twice the rate of men.

Indigenous communities were hardest hit. Among American Indian and Alaska Native adults, cirrhosis deaths reached 33 per 100,000 people in 2022, the highest of all racial and ethnic groups studied.

Hepatitis deaths more than doubled in those groups from 2010 to 2022, STAT News reported.

“The pandemic itself came under control, but the disparities that came with it continued and lingered,” said Dr. Nasim Maleki, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who reviewed the findings.

People between ages 25 and 44 had the biggest yearly increase in deaths from alcohol-associated hepatitis between 1999 and 2022. This condition can come on quickly and lead to symptoms like fatigue, jaundice (yellowing of the skin or eyes) and liver pain — even in folks who haven’t been drinking very long, STAT News said.

Experts worry the full effects of pandemic drinking may not be seen for many years.

“Alcohol-related cirrhosis takes time to develop. So we may not see the true extent of the consequences until five, probably 10, years from now, which is very concerning,” Dr. Robert Wong, a liver specialist at Stanford University, said.

One reason women may be affected more is because of how the body processes alcohol.

Biologically, cisgender women are less able to break down alcohol than cisgender men. That means even a little drinking can have a bigger impact on their organs over time.

That’s why current federal guidelines suggest that women have no more than one drink a day, while men may have up to two.

“You’d be surprised by how shocked people are when they hear that drinking more than two drinks per day, for example, is considered heavy drinking by federal definitions,” Lee explained.

In 2021, more than 12,000 deaths from “unspecified liver cirrhosis” were caused by heavy drinking, though that may not have been obvious from death certificates, said Marissa Esser, who led the alcohol program at U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) until it was shut down earlier by the Trump administration this year.

The American Medical Association recently came out in support of new efforts to educate people on how alcohol raises the risk of breast cancer.

The group is also calling for better labeling on alcohol containers to make the risks clearer, STAT News said.

Some studies suggest alcohol use dropped slightly after peaking in 2020, as conversations about drinking increased. Still, it’s unclear if that drop will lead to less deaths in the future.

ALD remains the leading reason for liver transplants in the U.S., and alcohol-associated hepatitis is the fastest-growing reason people need one.

Disclaimer: Statistical data in medical articles provide general trends and do not pertain to individuals. Individual factors can vary greatly. Always seek personalized medical advice for individual healthcare decisions.

© 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Posted June 2025

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