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• Posted November 12, 2024

U.S. Alcohol Intake Rose During Pandemic, and for Years After

Even as the pressures of the pandemic began to ebb, Americans' growing dependence on alcohol did not, a troubling new study shows.

Two years into the globe-altering health crisis, the percentage of Americans who consumed alcohol -- which had already spiked between 2018 and 2020 -- inched even further up in 2021 and 2022. Not only that, but more folks reported heavy or binge drinking, the findings published Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine revealed.

"Our results provide national data to draw further attention to the potential alcohol-related public health effects that may remain from the pandemic," the researchers wrote in their research. "Potential causes of this sustained increase include normalization of and adaptation to increased drinking due to stress from the pandemic and disrupted access to medical services." 

Alcohol can be addictive for some people, “and we know that addiction doesn’t go away, even if the initial trigger that started it has gone away,” explained study author Dr. Brian Lee, a hepatologist at the University of Southern California (USC).

“Early on in the pandemic, we were seeing an enormous surge of people coming in to the clinic and the hospital with alcohol-related problems," Lee told the New York Times. "People assumed this was caused by acute stress, like what we saw with 9/11 and Katrina, and typically it goes back to normal after these stressful events are over. But that’s not what we’re seeing.”

The latest findings were culled from data in the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Health Interview Survey, carried out from January 2022 through the end of the year. In that survey, almost 27,000 people over the age of 18 were asked about their drinking habits in the past year.

Spikes in drinking were seen in both sexes and every age, racial and ethnic group. Overall, 69.3% of Americans said they had consumed alcohol at some level in the past year, up from 69.03% in 2020 and 66.34% in 2018.

The number of Americans who also reported heavy drinking increased to nearly 6.3% in 2022, up from 6.13% in 2020 and 5.1% in 2018.

Heavy drinking for men is defined as consuming at least five drinks in a day or at least 15 drinks per week, while for women it means at least four drinks a day or at least eight per week.

White Americans were the most likely to be heavy drinkers among racial and ethnic groups, with about 7.3% reporting heavy drinking, up from about 5.7% in 2018 and 7.1% in 2020.

Among women of all ages, 6.45% said they had drunk heavily -- exceeding the rate among men, 6.1%. More women than men reported binge drinking in 2018, as well: about 5% of men, compared with about 5.2% of women.

Why are women drinking -- and binge drinking -- more than men?

The stresses of the pandemic may have been particularly acute for women, said study co-author Dr. Divya Ayyala-Somayajula, of the division of gastrointestinal and liver diseases at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

“The pandemic was a really stressful event,” she told the Times. “People were at home, there was no child care and one of the acceptable coping mechanisms is drinking alcohol to deal with stress, anxiety and depression.”

At the same time, mental health care was hard to find during the pandemic, she added.

Heavy drinking damages the liver; harms the heart muscle, leading to arrhythmias, strokes and high blood pressure; and can cause inflammation of the pancreas, according to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. It also weakens the immune system and has been associated with an increased risk of certain cancers.

But much of this damage takes years to surface, Lee noted.

“We know that alcohol use begins as a silent disease and only rears its head years later, in terms of chronic disease,” Lee warned. “What this will unveil for the future is what worries me.”

More information

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has more on problem drinking.

SOURCE: Annals of Internal Medicine, Nov. 12, 2024; New York Times