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 the National Institutes of Health 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 the RAND Corp. and Indiana University, was initially conceived as a five-year project looking at how people’s social networks influenced their substance use, said Michael Pollard, a RAND sociologist and the study’s lead author. The first interviews of the 6,000 study participants were 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, we were concerned that our primary interest was how people’s friends affect their drinking — and now the whole landscape of how people 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 in May 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 before were now drinking one more day a month.
Women saw a 41% increase on average in binge drinking, defined as four or more drinks in a few hours. One in five women in the study were 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 how one in five women added a binge drinking day on average, that means most women still aren’t binge drinking,” Pollard said. “But the women who are binge drinking have to drink quite a bit more heavily to pull up the average.”