American Addiction Centers analyzed the Disability-Adjusted Life Years data, and found that the average Virginian loses 1.31 healthy years of life due to drugs and alcohol abuse.
The World Health Organization calculates the impact of disease on life according to Disability- Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), which are the number of years lost and years lived with a disability.
One DALY is the equivalent of one lost year of healthy human life. For example, in the U.S., for every 100,000 people, an unfortunate average of 1,178 years of healthy life are lost due to the substance abuse epidemic.
Broken down by categories of substance in 2017 alone, Virginians lost:
- 63,779 healthy years to general opioid use disorders
- 7,489 years to cocaine
- 3,738 years to amphetamines
West Virginia was the state with the highest number of years lost per resident – an alarming 3.4 years – whilst Nebraska had the lowest value in comparison at just 0.9 years.
One of the most worrying statistics to emerge from the DALYs data was that overall in America, people lose on average 1.7 years of their life span because of drug and alcohol abuse.
If you’d like to learn more about this research, click here.
