“Tis the season to read about alcohol,” ASAM starts in its weekly briefing. It features high-intensity drinking, doubling of alcohol-related deaths, comorbidities and GLP-1s and how people quantify consumption differently across countries, sometimes normalising it.
This Week in the ASAM Weekly
Tis the season to read about alcohol. The New York Times, for example, has several articles on the topic, starting with high-intensity drinking. It’s a pattern more concerning than binge drinking and seems to have tracked with generational increases in alcohol intake among those who are currently middle-aged (The New York Times). Unfortunately, for too many, what happened in college did not stay in college.
This coincides with sharp increases in alcohol-related deaths, which have more than doubled from 1999 to 2022 (The New York Times). According to a study from the American Journal of Medicine – which did not include deaths related to accidents – several groups experienced notable increases, including women and Midwesterners. Along with these findings, the authors also discuss concerns about the overlapping risks from alcohol use, cardiomyopathy, and obesity.
These co-morbidities are partly why there is great interest in the use of GLP-1s to treat alcohol use disorder. Unfortunately, a systematic review finds there is still not enough research to make a definitive determination, but the promise is there (eClinicalMedicine).
As important as it is that we are talking about alcohol consumption, how we are talking about it may be more important. Many of the articles this week rely on quantifying consumption: British units, American drinks, binge drinking, heavy drinking, BAC, etc. So when The New York Times also publishes an article about how exercise could help with a hangover but only quantifies the amount as “you overdid it,” are we (unintentionally) normalizing behavior because we haven’t normalized a way to monitor it?
Sure, it’s complicated, but what if The New York Times also wrote an article about gifting personal breathalyzers this holiday season? Tracking BAC would surely seem pretty normal at that point.
Thanks for reading,
Nicholas Athanasiou, MD, MBA, DFASAM
Editor in Chief
with Co-Editors: Brandon Aden, MD, MPH, FASAM, Jack Woodside, MD, John A. Fromson, MD
