Alcohol consumption and Liver Disease

There have been lot of studies on high alcohol consumption and liver disease

Out of curiosity, I wanted to find out which country consumed the maximum amount of alcohol? Does consumption of alcohol in large quantities have any effect on the liver? I found data on Alcohol consumption per country provided by WHO. I found another data set on liver cancer per country again provided by WHO. We are going to analyze these data sets separately and see if there is any co-relation between alcohol consumption and liver cancer. Accordingly, countries with high alcohol consumption should have high cases of liver disease too as consuming alcohol in large quantities can result in liver damage. Let us start the analysis and see if the data supports this study.

The first data set comprises of Alcohol consumption per adult in litres for the years 2005 and 2008. There are 189 countries listed in this dataset . We loaded the dataset into a dataframe in R and used the melt function in package reshape2 to convert data into a long format.


I took the mean of the values for 2005 and 2008 grouped by country. Dplyr package was used to summarize the data. Let us start plotting the data.

Let us plot the lowest alcohol consuming countries(0-1 lt/person) first. Do you see anything common between these countries? 

Lowest Alcohol Cosumption

Now, let us look at highest alcohol consuming countries in the world( 15 lts/person and above)

Highest Alcohol Consumption

Maldova is the highest consumer of alcohol at 19.8 lts/person. Next comes Slovenia and South Korea.

Let us see how some of the first world countries are doing.

Alcohol Consumption amongst First World Countries

United States with less than 10lts/person is the lowest consumer in the group. That's unbelievable. I always thought that United States would top the list.

Let us analyze the liver cancer data now.

Countries with highest liver cancer cases in men

Mongolia seems to have the highest number of male liver cancer patients in the world. Next is Mozambique followed by North Korea and South Korea.

Now let us look at the female liver cancer data

Countries with highest liver cancer cases in women

Mongolia and Mozambique have higher numbers compared to the rest for women. But the numbers are half of what is for men. Wonder why? Is it because women in some cultures don't drink at all or drink lesser than men?

Now let us take a look at the liver cancer rates for countries with high alcohol consumption.

         

The co-relation between the two data sets do not exist. Look at the Liver cancer(men) data for countries with high alcohol consumption. Maldova has a liver cancer rate of 12/100,000 for men and 4/100,000 for women compared to Mongolia with a liver cancer rate of 98/100,00 for men and 46/100,000 for women. We were expecting Maldova to have the highest liver disease cases but Mongolia won the race. In this case, the data is not supporting the study.