TAG | Women closing gender gap with alcoholism |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Tuesday, 06 May 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 2 The U.S. study looked at various generations of people after World War II (1939-45). The conclusion found that women showed dramatic increases in drinking and alcohol dependency, especially with white and Hispanic women. The results of the study (“Secular Trends in the Lifetime Prevalence of Alcohol Dependence in the United States: A Re-evaluation”) are published in the May 2008 issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. The study was performed by Richard A. Grucza, Kathleen K. Bucholz, John P. Rice, and Laura J. Bierut, all from the Department of Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. According to the abstract to the paper, “U.S. epidemiologic surveys have consistently found higher lifetime prevalence of alcohol dependence among younger subjects than among older groups. Because lifetime prevalence is cumulative, such patterns are suggestive of strong secular trends; i.e., more-recently born subjects have developed more disease in a shorter period of time than their elders.” The authors wondered: "However, it remains unclear whether such patterns truly reflect secular trends or are confounded by age-dependent factors such as differential recall, differential mortality, and other effects.” To perform their study, the researchers used data from two large, national epidemiological surveys conducted about ten years apart. They are: the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiologic Survey (NLAES), conducted in 1991 and 1992; and the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC), conducted in 2001 and 2002. The two surveys were used “to compare lifetime prevalence of alcohol dependence across temporally adjacent birth cohorts surveyed at the same age, thus enabling estimates of cross-cohort differences while controlling for age-related factors.” Richard A. Grucze, an epidermiologist at Washington University and one of the authors, stated, "By looking at two different cross-sectional surveys that asked the same questions in the same manner, but were conducted 10 years apart, we were able to compare, for example, 30 - 40 year olds in 2001 with 30 - 40 year olds in 1991.” [Science Daily: "Alcoholism I Not Just 'A Man's Disease' Anymore"] Continuing: “Essentially, this allowed us to correct for the effects of age on reporting. When we did this, we found that the tendency for young people to have higher levels of lifetime alcohol dependence clearly remained for women, although it disappeared for men." More on the "closing gap of alcoholism" for women on the next page. |
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