Really interesting opinion piece in @addictionjournal.bsky.social here from some of my colleagues looking at the potential benefits and risks/challenges of no/lo alcohol products for very heavy drinkers and those in recovery: doi.org/10.1111/add....

Clinicians: Should patients at high risk of alcohol harm use no and low-alcohol drinks? New research highlights the need for nuanced guidance beyond zero-tolerance, considering non-abstinence goals and harm reduction:

The latest publication from our evaluation of the QUIT hospital-based tobacco dependence treatment service is now available. It investigates patient flows from hospital to community stop smoking services and subsequent quitting outcomes. Find out more about this work at quit.sites.sheffield.ac.uk

A nice primer here (ft. @sarg-scharr.bsky.social research) on no/lo alcohol prices and whether they really are more expensive than their alcoholic equivalents. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

A new @addictionjournal.bsky.social commentary warns of regulatory capture in UK alcohol licensing The ‘Licensing Taskforce’ - led by industry figures - could weaken democratic accountability & redefine licensing as business promotion, not public protection onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Alcoholic drinks, along with fruit and fish, are the only food and drink category to have got cheaper, in real terms, since the start of the cost-of-living crisis. Beer has got slightly more expensive in real terms since the end of 2022, but wine and spirits remain at late 2022 prices.

Happy to see this commentary come out - some thoughts on the limited implementation of the alcohol floor price in the Northern Territory, and the impact of inflation on the $1.30 price point with no indexation. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Join the Faculty’s Alcohol SIG for an online webinar: Alcohol Licensing Under Threat. Dr. James Nicholls & Prof. Niamh Fitzgerald will discuss proposed changes to alcohol licensing, including a new ‘economic growth’ objective. The event is open for FPH members www.fph.org.uk/events-cours...

New data shows that the rate of alcohol-specific deaths in England & Wales *fell* in 2024 by 7.8%, but remain well above pre-pandemic levels. This is the first fall since 2018, and is certainly good news, but the no. of people who sadly died from these causes in 2024 is still 1/3 higher than 2019

Interesting thoughts here on recent trends in young adult mortality in the US and Germany. The rise in alcohol deaths in both countries is something we've also seen across the UK. Just how long they might persist is a really important question for public health policy at the moment.

Want to know how to use MAIHDA to examine heterogeniety in policy outcomes? Here's a nice worked-through example! How does intersectional identity impact preference for in-person vs online GP appoinments? Has been great working with @healthfoundation.bsky.social colleagues on this :)

I was looking at some Scottish cause of death data yesterday and the extent to which transport accident deaths in young men have all but disappeared is pretty remarkable. Nice to find a good news story in this data for a change.

I spoke to @samuelacuff.bsky.social and @noahemery.bsky.social on their Addiction Psychologist podcast about the evidence on minimum unit pricing for alcohol. You can listen below: creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/...

The latest paper from our @nihr.bsky.social funded No/Lo Project finds that around a third of people use alcohol-free or low-alcohol drinks in attempts to cut down on drinking alcohol, but no clear evidence that they increase the success of these attempts. #AlcoholResearch #NoLo #AlcoholPolicy

Our new paper led by Inge Kersbergen finds no clear evidence that using alcohol-free or low-alcohol drinks increases the success of attempts to cut down on drinking. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Not a bad morning round these parts.

My wife requested a Battenberg birthday cake, so it would have been rude not to oblige. Pretty happy with how this turned out.

Plans to rapidly overhaul alcohol licensing in England and Wales have just been published. They're being sold as ‘tearing up outdated licensing rules’, but could seriously undermine democratic accountability and local control. The devil (as ever) is in the details. www.gov.uk/government/n...

Lots of coverage today on these new government proposals to reform the alcohol licensing system. I can see an inherent popular appeal to allowing pubs to stay open later, but I have a lot of thoughts about why these plans are an extremely bad idea.. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

📢 New paper published in @bmjtobacco-control.bsky.social Using electronic point-of-sales (EPOS) data, this study assesses purchase price of factory-made cigarettes and roll-your-own tobacco across neighbourhood deprivation and urban/rural status in Britain. #TobaccoResearch #PublicHealth

Here's more on the key findings from our report published earlier this week which uses the most recent available post-pandemic data to estimate the health and financial toll of alcohol consumption in Northern Ireland. #AlcoholPolicy #PublicHealth

We've got a new report out today using new data from Northern Ireland to estimate Alcohol-Attributable Fractions (AAFs) and the number of hospital admissions and deaths each year in NI caused by alcohol. Plus, how these break down by age, sex and condition. sarg-sheffield.ac.uk/wp-content/u...

We've got a shiny new report (full of lovely graphs) all about the no/low alcohol drinks market in Great Britain. How big is the market compared to for standard alcohol and how has it grown recently, how do prices compare, who drinks these products etc. We've got answers to all these questions:

Last chart for now - an update to this comparison of age trends in drug and alcohol deaths in Scotland. As much as the population rates are similar for both causes, the age patterns are *very* different, with drug deaths peaking in the 40s and alcohol deaths in the 60s.

A couple of bonus graphs - comparing today's alcohol-specific death figures for Scotland, with drug-related deaths trends published last month. The good news is that both fell in 2024, although drug-related deaths remain *way* above their levels 20 years ago.

New figures from National Records of Scotland out today show that alcohol-specific deaths in Scotland fell by 7% to their lowest level since 2019, and are now back in a similar place to where they were before the introduction of Minimum Unit Pricing in 2018. This is obviously good news...🧵

Other exciting news - my brilliant colleague Lucy Burke has had her 1st PhD paper published in BMJ Public Health. It looks as associations between the reasons why we drink alcohol and whether we drink no- and low-alcohol drinks and has some important implications for the NHS 10-year plan.

We've just launched a website showcasing our research on pub closure! Each 'long-read' explores the story of a closed pub and its social and cultural significance, drawing on field visits, archival research and extensive interviews with those connected to it. Links below!

Extremely proud and a bit jealous that my excellent colleagues @fieldmatt.bsky.social and Inge Kersbergen have won this year's Ig Nobel Peace prize for showing that being a bit tipsy makes you better at speaking Dutch. arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Found a good bird on my commute this morning.

Scotland published their drug-related deaths figures for 2024 last week. For only the second time since 2013 they show a fall year-on-year, so while they remain very high by historical standards, this is at least a sign of progress in the right direction. Here's a 🧵of a few graphs...

I didn’t get an alert. Does that mean that I’m extremely cool, or on some hitlist somewhere?

Oh, this is very good advice and extremely generalisable beyond economics.

Looking to do a PhD in demography, health, data science? Oxford Demography (LCDS) is recruiting to fill TWO positions! See Charlie's posts below for specifics. Come join us in the beautiful (albeit a bit rainy) Oxford!! 👩‍🏫📊🌦️

📢 New SARG paper 📢 This study aimed to investigate whether drinking occasion characteristics differ between those who moderate their drinking and those who do not, and among different subtypes of moderators. #alcoholresearch #publichealth

🎉 Huge congratulations to SARG researcher @ambercopeland.bsky.social who has secured almost £600k funding from the @wellcometrust.bsky.social to develop a cutting-edge computational model that explores how a person's environment influences their attempts to cut down on alcohol. #PublicHealth

The Welsh Government @senedd.wales commissioned us to model the impact of minimum unit pricing (MUP) on alcohol consumption and harm in Wales. We found that increasing MUP would reduce harms, but inflation erodes its value. Read our news story for more on our findings 👇 #AlcoholPolicy

I do love me a weird old map or a map of weird old things

Amazingly, every sentence manages to be a bit more Florida than the last.

New paper on changes in sales of alcohol and alcohol-free/low-alcohol products in January, and whether these changes drive longer term trends! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Led by @aishamoolla.bsky.social @jholmessheff.bsky.social @voodooeconomics.bsky.social @jamiebrown.bsky.social

Can’t wait to introduce bird-based storage into my backup system

We've got a big new report out today, commissioned by the Welsh Government, modelling alternative options for the future of Minimum Unit Pricing in Wales. www.gov.wales/new-modellin...

Great blog post from SARG's @voodooeconomics.bsky.social explaining some of the latest findings from our @nihr.bsky.social funded project 'Reforming alcohol taxes in a cost-of-living crisis'. Find out more about the project on our website 👇 #publichealth @fohsheffield.bsky.social

How did the alcohol duty reform affect households? In our latest blog, Dr Luke Wilson explains @sarg-scharr.bsky.social's new analysis showing the reform mainly hit heavy drinkers & wealthier households 📉Low risk of worsening inequality 📈Likely public health gain www.ias.org.uk/2025/07/24/w...

Does anybody have a link to the Lib Dem 'analysis' behind this story? Did somebody just stick a straight line through the increase in deaths between 2019 and 2023 and extrapolate it (because that does suspiciously get to the same answer)? www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/...

I’ve been at the theatre all night (watching Tim Minchin, who was ace). Did I miss any football?

New inflation figures yesterday and I haven't posted this graph for a while, so here we go - average changes in price of food and drink categories since Jan 2021 relative to overall inflation. Wine, spirits and beer have all risen below inflation and less than most other food and drink.

Worth a read. We need to move beyond arbitrary categorisation of continuous variables or assuming that associations are linear - and use more flexible modelling approaches to capture non-linear relationships. www.bmj.com/content/390/...

This new paper led by @sophiebright.bsky.social introduces the Intersectional Alcohol Inequities Framework (IAIF), a conceptual tool designed to visually illustrate how diverse factors across multiple levels and domains intersect to shape inequities in alcohol consumption and related harms.