Appalachian Diseases of Despair, 2022


Author(s): Megan Heffernan, Malina Papanikolaou, and Michael Meit
Author Organization(s): NORC at the University of Chicago & East Tennessee State University

This study analyzed the impact of diseases of despair on mortality within the Appalachian Region, focusing on mortality from three main causes: alcohol, prescription drug, and illegal drug overdose; suicide; and alcoholic liver disease/cirrhosis of the liver. It served as an update to ARC reports from 2017 and 2020 looking at the same issues, providing two additional years of single-year data that allowed recent trends to be analyzed.