Corrigendum to “The impact of alcohol policies on alcohol-attributable diseases in Taiwan–A population-based study” [Drug Alcohol Depend. 180 (2017) 103–112] (S0376871617304386) (10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2017.06.044))

Abstract

The authors regret that errors were made in their paper, and have provided the following corrigendum. It has been brought to our attention that we failed to appropriately accredit our process for selecting alcohol-attributable diseases (AADs), and our description of the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model, both which were based upon work previously published by Lin and Liao (2013). Our work should have cited the work of Lin and Liao (2013) in Sections 2.2 and 4.1 of our paper, and acknowledged that text in these sections considerably overlapped with that paper. In addition, Section 3.2 of our paper was from the Lin and Liao 2013 paper, and we should have given credit to their paper about the tax description. We apologize for these serious omissions in attribution. Specifically, the first paragraph of Section 2.2 of our paper is based upon the Lin and Liao paper. That paragraph of our paper should be corrected as follows: A monthly incidence rate was calculated for all AADs combined and, for some diagnoses, for individual AADs. This approach was based upon the work of Lin and Liao (2013), and as described by them: The selection of AADs was based on comprehensive reviews of the literature (Rehm et al., 2009; Shultz et al., 1991; Wagennar et al., 2009; Amin-Esmaeili et al., 2017). The following diseases were counted as AADs in our analyses: alcoholic liver disease (ICD code: 571.0–571.3), alcohol psychoses (291.0–291.9), alcohol abuse, alcohol dependence syndrome (303, 305.0), al- coholic polyneuropathy (357.5), alcoholic cardiomyopathy (425.5), alcoholic gastritis (535.3), and acute alcohol poisoning (980.0). All patients with any of these diagnoses were counted in the calculation of the incidence rates. Almost all patients in Taiwan with severe alcoholic disorders were included in the data due to the easy accessibility of care here. Section 4.1 of our paper described the ARIMA model, and again is based upon the work of Lin and Liao (2013). This section should be corrected to read: The study analyses randomly selected patients admitted to a hospital between January 1996 and December 2011, a 16-year period. Monthly count data for AADs were extracted from the LHID2010 database. The ARIMA approach was based upon the work of Lin and Liao (2013), as described by them: Given the large number of repeated observations, we used an intervention analysis with noise series that follows a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model; such an analysis is well- suited to assessing the impact of an intervention on stationary or non- stationary time series (Box et al., 1994; Wei, 1990). The auto- correction function (ACF) and the partial autocorrelation function (PACF) were first adopted to identify possible long-term trends and other regularities in the series. Second, interventional components are added when an adequate model for the stochastic behavior of the series is identified, resulting in a full impact assessment model. The interventional components are also examined during the time of intervention. Lack-of-fit for these models is assessed using Box-Ljung statistics. Finally, the appropriate intervention models are selected using Akaike's information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian information criterion (BIC) based upon the maximum likelihood method. Finally, the material from Section 3.2 of our paper is from Lin and Liao (2013), and should be revised to read as follows: This description of the alcohol tax is from work previously published by Lin and Liao (2013): Due to its low cost and cultural tradition, domestic rice wine (rice spirits) produced by the Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Monopoly Bureau has always been the most popular alcoholic beverage in Taiwan, with approximately 200 million bottles sold per year through 2002. In the 1990s, the US government, acting at the behest of the US beverage industry, requested that Taiwan lower tariffs on imports of most spirits. As a result, a new alcohol management and tax system went into effect on January 1, 2002, as a condition of Taiwan's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession. Rice wine tax rates therefore increased from $0.73 (USD) per liter of beverage to approximately $5 with the adoption of the new tax system, rising further to $6.16/L in 2003. Other classes of alcohol in Taiwan, with tax rates ranging from $0.23/L to $6.16, saw little to no change either before or after adoption of the new alcohol tax policy in 2002. By contrast, retail prices for rice wine increased by seven times on average under the new system, and since 2002, the volume of rice wine sold per year has decreased to ten million bottles. A new tax policy was adopted in June of 2009 setting rice wine tax rates at $1.60/L, a 74% reduction from the prior $6.16/L rate. This corrigendum serves to note these changes to our paper. In addition, the following reference should be added to our paper: Lin, Chih-Ming, and Chen-Mao Liao. “Alcohol Tax Policy in Relation to Hospitalization from Alcohol-Attributed Diseases in Taiwan: A Nationwide Population Analysis of Data from 1996 to 2010.” Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, vol. 37, no. 9, Nov. 2013, pp. 1544–1551., https://doi.org/10.1111/acer.12128 We apologize for these unintended omissions, and have reviewed the circumstances under which this occurred with our institutional representative to ensure such errors do not occur in the future.