TY - JOUR T1 - Heartbeat: alcohol and the heart JF - Heart JO - Heart SP - 1639 LP - 1640 DO - 10.1136/heartjnl-2018-314119 VL - 104 IS - 20 AU - Tom Luiz Ribeiro AU - Catherine M Otto Y1 - 2018/10/01 UR - http://heart.bmj.com/content/104/20/1639.abstract N2 - The effects of alcohol on the heart have always been of interest for the cardiology community, with reports of both beneficial and deleterious effects. Alcoholic cardiomyopathy (ACM) is a specific form of dilated cardiomyopathy linked to chronic heavy alcohol use. In this issue of Heart, Manthey and colleagues1 used modelling strategies to estimate sex-specific mortality rates due to ACM for all countries in the world, which were subsequently aggregated by region and globally. Input data on ACM mortality were obtained from death registries for 91 countries and estimated by regression equations in the others. Overall, there were 25 997 deaths worldwide due to ACM in 2015, with a mortality rate estimated at 4.9 deaths per 1 000 000 adults (women: 2.1; men: 7.6). The distribution of deaths was markedly uneven, with nearly 80% occurring in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia, which has the highest estimated mortality rate of 163.8 per 1 000 000 population (figure 1).Figure 1 Alcoholic cardiomyopathy mortality rates (deaths per 1 000 000 adult population) in 2015. Mortality rates denote the number of deaths per 1 000 000 adult population.Under-reporting (ie, recorded deaths were lower than predicted lower … ER -