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Abstract
In a 1999 paper in Contemporary Drug Problems, Terris' 1967 paper on the epidemiology of alcohol consumption and cirrhosis was celebrated by sociologist Ron Roizen and colleagues, from the University of California at San Francisco, for its "special place in the history of alcohol epidemiology". The paper went largely unnoticed at the time. However, a "mid-1970s downturn in the American cirrhosis mortality rate in effect tended to confirm his 1967 paper's advice to ignore beer in the relationship between per capita ethanol consumption and cirrhosis mortality", Roizen told the Lancet. "I'm just glad that our little paper celebrating his 1967 paper's prescience came out before he died", Roizen says. "I'd like to think that he enjoyed learning that he had predicted a change of direction in the US cirrhosis mortality trend a half-dozen years before it happened-and thus shed light on a puzzle that has remained unsolved to this day."