Box 3. Major disease and injury categories causally impacted by alcohol consumption
Green: Overall beneficial effects from low-risk patterns of drinking, while heavy drinking is
detrimental
Red: 100% alcohol-attributable
Neuropsychiatric conditions: alcohol use disorders (AUDs, see Box 4) are the most important
neuropsychiatric conditions caused by alcohol consumption. Epilepsy is another disease
causally impacted by alcohol, over and above withdrawal-induced seizures (Samokhvalov et
al., 2010b). Alcohol consumption is associated with many other neuropsychiatric conditions,
such as depression or anxiety disorders (Kessler, 2004; Boden and Fergusson, 2011), but the
complexity of the pathways of these associations currently prevents their inclusion in the
estimates of alcohol-attributable disease burden (Rehm et al., 2010a).