Study finds US adults are drinking more during pandemic
Americans older than age 30 have been drinking more during the pandemic, a new study funded by theNational Institutes ofHealth has found, raising concern for researchers that stressed adults looking for relief during lockdown may be putting themselves at risk for other health concerns.
The study, by researchers at theRANDCorp. and Indiana University, was initially conceived as a five-year project looking at howpeople’s social networks influenced their substance use, said Michael Pollard, a RANDsociologist and the study’s lead author. The first interviews of the 6,000 study participantswere conducted in 2019.
Then the pandemic hit, and Pollard and his colleagues found themselves with a unique trove of data that shows how COVID-19 has affected the lives — and drinking habits— of thousands of Americans.
“Initially, wewere concerned that our primary interestwas howpeople’s friends affect their drinking— and nowthe whole landscape of howpeople interact with their friends has changed,” Pollard said. But he said the researchers realized that the data they collected could provide an important baseline to compare respondents’ drinking habits, prepandemic.
Interviewing adults ages 30 to 80 inMay and June, researchers found that people’s frequency of alcohol consumption had increased by 14% on average since 2019. Three out of four people in the study who had been drinking five days a month beforewere nowdrinking one more day a month.
Women sawa 41% increase on average in binge drinking, defined as four or more drinks in a few hours. One in fivewomen in the studywere binge drinking one more day per month than they had in 2019, Pollard said. Women also reported an increase in negative consequences from drinking.
“For a lot of these behaviors, like binge drinking, when you talk about howone in fivewomen added a binge drinking day on average, that means mostwomen still aren’t binge drinking,” Pollard said. “But thewomen who are binge drinking have to drink quite a bit more heavily to pull up the average.”