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Stress-related drinking and alcohol-related deaths in the U.S. due to the Covid-19 pandemic have not decreased as much as Dr. Brian Lee, a hepatologist at Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California, had anticipated.
“I was hoping that we could reduce alcohol consumption, but I'm a liver specialist, and the fact is that we've definitely seen it in patients with liver failure, which is actually a very serious clinical condition. “So we've definitely seen the epidemic in a big way. And if you look at my clinic and the hospital, at least from my experience, it hasn't come down.”
New research, led by Lee and published Nov. 12 by Internal medicine reports, In the year Alcohol consumption among people in the US in 2020 increased slightly in 2021 and 2022.
The study used data from the National Health Interview Survey administered by the US Census Bureau and compared the data to 2018 as a baseline. The survey included nearly 25,000 respondents from 2018, 31,000 from 2020 and 27,000 from 2022.
Increases in drinking rates have been observed in men and women and across all races and ethnicities. In the year In 2022, 69.3% of Americans reported drinking some alcohol in the past year, up slightly from 69% in 2020 and 66.34% in 2018.
In addition, the percentage of heavy drinkers was nearly 6.3% of those surveyed in 2022, up from 6.13% in 2020 and 5.1% in 2018.
“The findings are troubling but not surprising,” said Dr. Jagret Chatwal, director of the Technology Assessment Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was not involved in the study. “Alcohol consumption has been increasing over the past several years.”
White Americans experienced the largest change in heavy drinking, with approximately 7.3% reporting heavy drinking, up from 5.7% in 2018 and 7.1% in 2020.
Women were more likely to be heavy drinkers with 6.45% reporting compared to 6.1% of men.
“If you're drinking more than one drink a day as a woman, you could be at risk for liver disease,” says Lee, who doesn't take too much alcohol to increase health risks.
National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcoholism In women, heavy drinking is defined as four or more drinks on any given day or eight or more drinks. For men, it is defined as five or more drinks per day or 15 or more drinks per week.
The agency considers the drink to contain about 14 grams of pure alcohol, which is equivalent to about 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits.
While the researchers can't answer exactly why alcohol consumption is so high among the American adults studied, Lee has a few hypotheses.
“They've had really pandemic-related impacts on their jobs, losing their jobs or losing their day-to-day activities. “Some of them have small children,” he said. “We know that alcohol is used as a coping mechanism for stress. What started as a habit can become an addiction or a substance use disorder.
Chatwal agrees that life stressors such as financial insecurity, work pressure or other mental health struggles can contribute to increased alcohol consumption.
“Increasing stress and burnout in society exacerbates this tendency,” he said. “It increases the normalization of drinking culture and leads to excessive drinking. Unfortunately, most people realize the damage caused by alcohol only in the later stages of liver disease when treatment options are limited.”
According to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People who die due to alcohol consumption In 2020, more than 49,000 people died during the outbreak in the US. The height of the epidemic is on average about 488 people die a day Due to excessive alcohol consumption; It has seen an increase of over 29% from 2016-17 to 2020-21.
Lee believes that research findings alone are not enough to prevent people from drinking too much.
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“In the last 20 years, we have shown a five-fold increase in liver transplants for alcoholics. We have also shown that alcohol causes increased mortality due to liver disease. “Now it's intervention. What interventions can save lives and what policies can we put in place to stop the epidemic?
Chatwal recommends higher taxes at retailers and restricting sales hours to reduce access to alcohol.
Lee and Chatwal also suggest that more and better messaging about the dangers of overdose can help counter these effects.
“People need to know what harmful alcohol use is and what it does to your body,” Lee said. he said. “Medical professionals need to tell their patients about alcohol consumption openly and without judgement. Alcohol has been implicated in more than 200 diseases—heart disease, cancer, pancreatic disease—it can really affect your body, and both patients and doctors need to be aware of that.”