At the pandemic’s start, Americans began drinking more. They still are

Americans started drinking more as the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. They were stressed, isolated, uncertain — the world as they had known it had changed overnight.

Two years into the disaster, the trend had not abated, researchers reported Monday.

The percentage of Americans who consumed alcohol, which had risen from 2018 to 2020, inched up further in 2021 and 2022. And more people reported heavy or binge drinking.

“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,” said Dr. Brian Lee, a hepatologist at the University of Southern California and the principal investigator of the study, published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

“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,” he added. “But that’s not what we’re seeing.”

Alcohol can be addictive, “and we know that addiction doesn’t go away, even if the initial trigger that started it has gone away,” Lee said.

Rates of heavy drinking and of alcohol-related liver disease had been rising steadily for decades before the pandemic struck. But alcohol-related deaths surged in 2020, with one study reporting a 25% increase in a single year, said Christian Hendershot, director of clinical research at USC’s Institute for Addiction Science.

The new study was based on data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Health Interview Survey, carried out from January 2022 through the end of the year. A total of 26,806 people ages 18 and over were asked about their drinking habits in the past year.

Because the survey was based on self-reports, and did not include members of the military or institutionalized adults, the results may underestimate the problem, Lee and his colleagues cautioned.

The increases in alcohol use were found in both sexes; in every age, racial and ethnic group; and in every geographic region. 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.

More important, the number of Americans who reported consuming alcohol at levels defined as heavy drinking increased to 6.29% in 2022, up from 6.13% in 2020 and 5.1% in 2018, the study found.

(Heavy drinking for men is consuming at least five drinks in a day or at least 15 drinks per week, and for women at least four drinks a day and at least eight per week. Binge drinking is defined as having four to five drinks in a roughly two-hour period.)

White Americans were most likely to be heavy drinkers among racial and ethnic groups, with 7.34% reporting heavy drinking, up from 5.69% in 2018 and 7.11% in 2020.

The uptick in heavy drinking was especially notable in two groups. Adults in their 40s reported the highest levels. A total of 8.23% of Americans ages 40 to 49 said they had drunk heavily in 2022, up from 6.49% in 2020 and 5.14% in 2018.

Adults ages 50 to 64 were not far behind, with 7.15% reporting heavy drinking, up from 5.65% in 2018 and 6.95% in 2020.

And among women of all ages, 6.45% said they had drunk heavily — exceeding the rate among men, 6.12%.

More women than men reported binge drinking in 2018 as well: 5.01% of men, compared with 5.19% of women. Both sexes reported an uptick in heavy drinking in 2020: 6.19% of men and 6.08% of women.

The stresses of the pandemic may have been especially burdensome for women, said a co-author of the study, 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 said. “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.”

While it may be seen as socially acceptable, drinking is a “maladaptive” and harmful way to deal with stress, Ayyala-Somayajula added.

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