Alcohol-linked liver cancer deaths reversed course during COVID-19 pandemic

For three decades, the slow work of public health seemed to be winning against alcohol-linked liver cancer — until the pandemic arrived and quietly reversed the gains. A sweeping analysis of global mortality data from 1990 to 2023 reveals that while deaths from cirrhosis, cardiomyopathy, and alcohol use disorders continued their long decline, liver cancer mortality broke from the pattern during the COVID-19 years, rising at nearly twice the rate it had been falling. Women bore a disproportionate share of this reversal, a detail that speaks to how crises rarely distribute their burdens evenly.