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Online Tools

Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) software

Excessive alcohol use is the 3rd leading life-style related cause of death in the United States. To assist professionals in state and local public health departments to estimate the impact of alcohol-related deaths and years of potential life lost (YPLL)—a measure of premature death—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded the development of the Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) software. Originally released in 1989, ARDI software was specifically designed to allow states to calculate alcohol-attributable deaths, YPLL, direct health-care costs, indirect morbidity and morality costs, and non-health-sector costs associated with alcohol misuse.

In 2002, with support from a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Alcohol Team in CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion began updating ARDI and migrating it to the Internet to be more accessible to state-based epidemiologists and other users. In September 2004, the new version of ARDI was released in conjunction with a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report entitled Alcohol-Attributable Deaths and Years of Potential Life Lost – United States, 2001. That report highlighted that approximately 75,000 alcohol-attributable deaths occurred in 2001 resulting in approximately 2.3 million YPLLs. In February 2008, additional years of data were added, which resulted in 5–year average annual estimates of health impacts based on the years 2001-2005. This was done to produce more stable estimates than can be obtained from single year data. Based on this enhancement, there were approximately 79,000 deaths annually for the years from 2001–2005 that were attributable to excessive alcohol use.

ARDI includes reports for all 50 states with options to view each report by gender and age groups. Since the original release in 2004, ARDI has been enhanced to include reports specifically focused on individuals under age 21 years. In addition, the Custom Data feature has been enhanced to make it easier for users to conduct sub-state analyses of alcohol-attributable deaths and YPLL.

A future planned activity is a national report estimating the economic burden of excessive alcohol use.

ARDI software can be accessed at Alcohol-Related Disease Impact software home.

Page last reviewed: August 6, 2008
Page last modified: August 6, 2008
Content source: Division of Adult and Community Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion

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