Latinos-Cirrhosis Death Link Found

Latinos have the nation’s highest rate of death from cirrhosis of the liver, according to an analysis by a federal agency that researches alcohol-related problems.

“The new [Latino] ethnicity distinction on certificates of death corrects the decades-old belief that black males are at greatest risk of cirrhosis death,” said Mary C. Dufour, deputy director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

The findings are based on mortality data from 1997, when all states listed Latino origin on death certificates.

The overall cirrhosis death rate for 1997 was 7.4 per 100,000 people.

For whites of Latino origin, the rate was 13 per 100,000, compared with 8.7 for blacks and 6.8 for non-Latino whites. Rates in all groups were much higher for men than women.

Frederick S. Stinson, lead author of the study, said the findings were “quite a surprise.”

He said the message to doctors is that, if they have Latino patients, they may want to pay more attention to that person’s pattern of alcohol consumption.

More than half of all cirrhosis of the liver is related to alcohol use.

Stinson said other studies have found that Latino men do not tend to drink any more alcohol than other men, on average, but are more likely to drink heavily on weekends, as opposed to stretching out their alcohol consumption over the entire week. That means they tend to drink more at one time, he said.

Other possible factors, he said, include poverty status and low use of medical care services.

The findings, which were reported in the August issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, did not surprise Raul Caetano, an epidemiologist and assistant dean at the University of Texas’ Houston Health Science Center.

“We have suspected this for a long, long time. The problem has been the lack of a data set that had reliable ethnicity,” Caetano said.