Alcohol consumption and dementia diagnoses in the UK

FOI Reference: FOI/2022/3507

You asked

I am investigating the correlation between alcohol consumption and dementia diagnoses in the UK.

I have searched your website and was unable to find the alcohol consumption data for the UK, broken down into the following regions - Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales. May I request for the 2010 - 2021 data for this, or starting from the earliest data you have available?

We said

Thank you for your request.

We do not hold data on alcohol consumption within the United Kingdom.

We do hold historic analysis of Adult drinking habits in Great Britain which was taken from data collected as part of the Annual Population Survey. However, this series has now been discontinued.

Alternative sources for this information can be found in:

The Health Survey for England (HSE) is a series of annual surveys about the health of people living in England, commissioned by NHS Digital. Data on the proportion of adults who drank alcohol in the previous week are available from 1998. HSE data are also featured in NHS Digital's annual report, Statistics on Alcohol, which brings a variety of statistics on alcohol into one place.

For Scottish data, the Scottish Health Survey, commissioned by the Scottish Government, provides a detailed picture of the health of the Scottish population in private households and is designed to make a major contribution to the monitoring of health in Scotland. Data on alcohol consumption can be found in the Scottish Health Survey 2016: Volume 1: Main Report and are available from 2003.

And finally for Welsh data, the National Survey for Wales, commissioned by the Welsh Government, involves around 10,000 people a year across the whole of Wales and questions them on a variety of topics including housing, culture and Welsh language, as well as population health. The latest data, including that on alcohol consumption, is available to explore.

We do publish analysis of Alcohol-specific deaths in the UK. Data is available from 2001 to 2020 within this workbook and is available on a regional and constituent country level on table 1.

Alcohol-specific deaths only include those health conditions where each death is a direct consequence of alcohol misuse (that is, wholly attributable causes such as alcoholic liver disease). ​

Further information on this publication is available in our Alcohol-specific deaths in the UK QMI