Aims: To investigate age, period and cohort effects on time trends of alcohol-related mortality in countries with different drinking habits and alcohol policies.
Design and setting: Age-period-cohort (APC) analyses on alcohol-related mortality were conducted in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, France and Germany.
Participants: Cases included alcohol-related deaths in the age range 20-84 years between 1980 and 2009.
Measurements: Mortality data were taken from national causes of death registries and covered the ICD codes alcoholic psychosis, alcohol use disorders, alcoholic liver disease and toxic effect of alcohol.
Findings: In all countries changes across age, period and cohort were found to be significant for both genders [effect value with confidence interval (CI) shown in Supporting information, Table S1]. Period effects pointed to an increase in alcohol-related mortality in Denmark, Finland and Germany and a slightly decreasing trend in Sweden, while in Norway an inverse U-shaped curve and in France a U-shaped curve was found. Compared with the cohorts born before 1960, the risk of alcohol-related mortality declined substantially in cohorts born in the 1960s and later. Pairwise between-country comparisons revealed more statistically significant differences for period (P Conclusions: Strong period effects suggest that temporal changes in alcohol-related mortality in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, France and Germany between 1980 and 2009 were related to secular differences affecting the whole population and that these effects differed across countries.