Patterns of alcohol consumption and blood alcohol levels in emergency room patients.

The study was conducted in a public hospital of the province of Jujuy, Argentina.

A survey was conducted among all patients during the 24 hours of 4 consecutive days (N = 500) using the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, short version (AUDIT-C). Blood samples were collected in 84% of participants.

Results showed that;

• 37% were hazardous drinkers (men 50% vs. women 23%),
• 29% had symptoms of dependence (men 48% vs. women 11%);
• 17% of men and 3% of women had high blood alcohol levels, equal or greater than 50 mg/dl.

In multivariate logistic regression models men had;

• increased likelihood of hazardous drinking (Adjusted OR 3.2; 95% CI 2.1-5.0),
• symptoms of dependence (Adjusted OR 7.5; 95% CI 4.4-12.7) and
• increased blood alcohol levels (Adjusted OR 8.0; 95% CI 2.2-28.8), compared with women.

Patients admitted due to accidents, violence, or drug use, had;

• increased likelihood of hazardous drinking (Adjusted OR 2.4; 95% CI 1.5-3.9),
• dependence symptoms (Adjusted OR 2.0; 95% CI 1.2-3.3) and
• increased blood alcohol levels (Adjusted OR 7.7; 95% CI 3.0-19.8), compared with those admitted for other reasons.

Alcoholism has a significant impact on the occurrence of injuries and on the demand imposed on health services.

Prevention programs can potentially reduce the negative health and social impact of alcoholism.

Research; Medicina (B Aires). 2008;68(1):31-6. Alcohol consumption in the emergency room. Alderete E, Bianchini P.

See also;

• Brief-TSF can assist patients cease alcohol consumption.
• Twelve-Step Programs as an Adjunct to Psychotherapy and Psychopharmacology
• Subscribe to BriefTSF by e-Mail

Understanding and Counseling: Persons With Alcohol, Drug, and Behavioral Addictions by Howard Clinebell Read more about this title…

Beyond Codependency: And Getting Better All the Time

By Melody Beattie

Review By Neal J. Pollock (VA USA)

While I have not read Melody Beattie’s other works, I thought this a very valuable book in and of itself. It sheds much light on the topic and helped me to become sensitized to the obvious signs of codependency in people. By doing this, it enabled me to avoid situations where I could become codependent in a relationship.

I think that, as in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, there are levels of psychological situations and/or problems. Thus, there may be people inherently inclined towards codependency, but there may also be people who are thrust into it due to the demands of others. The latter may find this book incredibly helpful in avoiding such relationships and in helping their dependent person seek real help vs. codependency from another person. There are also a number of great quotes by the author in this book. A few are:

p. 70: “It’s hard to feel compassion for someone while that person is using or victimizing us.”

p. 71: “If everything looks black, we’ve probably got our eyes shut.”

p. 164: “Who we’re in a relationship with says as much about us as it does about them.” Earnie Tucker (quoted by Melody Beattie)

Codependency is not something to make light of, it’s as much (if not more) the codependent’s problem as the dependent’s. As Caroline Casey humorously noted in “Making the Gods Work for You” (Harmony Books NY 1998), on page 72:
“What do codependents see when they die? Someone else’s life flashes before their eyes.”

This is literally a life-changing book for codependents.

Reviewer: A reader

Once Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More has been “digested”, Beyond Codependency helps to move the recovering codependent past the hurt and on to the business of literally changing behaviors and making a better life. I absolutely recommend this book above any others to recovering codependents.

Obstetricians Often Overlook Alcohol Consumption In Pregnancy, says the Australian And New Zealand Journal Of Obstetrics And Gynaecology

One in every two pregnant Australian woman still consume alcohol during pregnancy, according to a study in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The responsibility of providing accurate information about the harmful effects of alcohol and its lifelong effects on the child falls on obstetricians and other health professionals.

And yet, almost half of the obstetricians interviewed said they did not routinely ask about alcohol consumption in pregnancy.

An editorial by Professor Elizabeth Elliot from the University of Sydney titled “Alcohol and Pregnancy: the Pivotal Role of the Obstetrician”, discusses the state of awareness about the adverse effects of alcohol consumption during pregnancy and the obstetricians’ participation in educating against maternal drinking.

Only 16% of the obstetricians routinely provided information about the consequences of alcohol in pregnancy, while only 5% gave advice which were consistent with the latest guidelines of The National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) – which states that, for pregnant women, ‘no drinking is the safest option’.

Professor Elliot says, “Failure to provide information about the dangers of alcohol consumption in the antenatal consultation represents a lost opportunity. Accurate recording of antenatal alcohol exposure will help identify children who require pediatric assessment, since the effects of alcohol may not be obvious at birth.”

“More importantly, identifying the women who are unable to stop drinking provides an important opening for the management of problem drinking and prevention of exposure to alcohol in future pregnancies,” added Professor Elliot.

Alcohol consumption during pregnancy has been associated with increased risks of miscarriage, stillbirth, intrauterine growth restriction, pre-term birth and low birth-weight. However, the best known adverse effect of alcohol exposure on the fetus is the fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) – which is associated with a wide range of birth defects and ongoing educational, behavioral and psychological problems.

This paper is published in the June 2008 issue of Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (Vol. 48, Issue 3, 2008).

See also;

1. Facial features of fetal alcohol syndrome
2. Alcohol and Pregnancy
3. Alcohol Free Pregnancies
4. Alcohol intervention may help.
5. Brief-TSF can assist patients cease alcohol consumption.

Women Can Inherit Drinking Problem Too, Study Finds

In the first major twin study to compare genetic and environmental factors that contribute to the risk of alcoholism in both sexes, researchers have found that genetics plays an important role in determining alcohol dependence in women as well as in men. The study contradicts the long-held assumption that a woman’s environment is more likely to influence whether she becomes dependent on alcohol.

The study was conducted by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Australian collaborators at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. It was funded by the U.S. National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, and the findings were published in a recent issue of the journal Psychological Medicine.

While there is ample evidence for an important genetic influence on alcoholism risk in men, the tie between genetics and alcoholism in women has been uncertain, said the paper’s lead author, Andrew Heath, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry at Washington University.

The study sought to address this shortcoming. It involved 2,685 pairs of twins, all participants in an adult twin study started in Australia in 1978 and maintained by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. The two members of each pair were raised in the same home environment. The study included — for the first time — twins of opposite sex as well as twins that were either both male or both female.

Telephone interviews with the twins were conducted to assess whether the participants had lost control over their drinking, were unable to cut back on drinking or had similar problems with alcohol.

Twins who had an alcoholic identical twin were much more likely to be alcoholic themselves than were twins who had an alcoholic fraternal twin, and this was equally true in women and in men. More surprisingly, men who had an alcoholic twin sister had very high rates of alcoholism.

“If shared environmental factors are of predominant importance in women but genetic influences predominate in men — a commonly held belief — then we would have expected to see very low concordance for alcoholism of unlike-sex twin pairs,” Heath said. “That wasn’t the case.”

The study also found that women with an alcoholic identical (monozygotic) twin sister were six times more likely to be alcohol dependent than other women. Monozygotic twins share the same genetic makeup. Dizygotic, or nonidentical, twins, who are not more alike genetically than ordinary sisters, were only three times more likely to be alcohol dependent if their twin had a drinking problem.

The study also examined whether psychiatric disorders that commonly precede or coexist with alcoholism, such as childhood behavior problems like lying and stealing or depression, were as strongly associated with risk of alcoholism in women as in men.

“It used to be believed that depression predicted increased risk of alcohol problems in women, whereas a history of childhood behavior problems predicted alcoholism risk in men. We found that depression is a potent predictor for alcohol dependence in both men and women,” said Heath. “A history of behavior problems also is as strong a predictor in women than in men — slightly more powerful in women, in fact.”

Heath AC, Bucholz KK, Madden PAF, Dinwiddie SH, Slutske WS, Bierut LJ, Statham DJ, Dunne MP, Whitfield JB, Martin NG. “Genetic and Environmental Contributions to Alcohol Dependence Risk in a National Twin Sample — Consistency of Findings in Women and Men”. Psychological Medicine. 27(6):1381-1396, 1997 November.

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• Return To Drinking After Liver Transplantation For Alcoholic Liver Disease
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Research Summary; Women and men appear to have different genetic and environmental risk factors for alcoholism, Reuters reported Jan. 24/2006.

A quartet of new family studies on alcoholism show, for example, that while both sexes are more likely to develop alcoholism if they have a history of aggressive behavior in childhood, women who experienced severe physical punishment in childhood were also at elevated risk, while men were not.

“Clearly, there are some common antecedents (to alcoholism), such as conduct disorder or symptoms, but there are also predictors unique to each gender,” said researcher Aruna Gogineni of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “These are the kinds of findings that call out for many more studies on women in order to determine how the mechanisms of alcoholic parental risk may differ in men and women.”

Researchers affirmed that children of alcoholics were generally more likely to have alcohol problems themselves, but said that genetic makeup may be more important for men, while environmental factors may have more of an impact on women. For example, one study comparing children of biological and adopted parents with alcoholism found that male children of alcoholics related by blood were more likely to be alcoholics themselves.

The research appears in the February 2006 issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

From; Join Together Online

See also;

• 12-Step Treatment More Effective than Alternative
• Twelve Step Facilitation
• Brief-TSF can assist patients cease alcohol consumption.
• Subscribe to BriefTSF by e-Mail

Understanding and Counseling: Persons With Alcohol, Drug, and Behavioral Addictions : Counseling for Recovery and Prevention Using Psychology and Religion by Howard Clinebell Read more about this title…

The more alcohol an individual drinks, the more the risk of suicide grows, according to a researcher at Canada’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

All Headline News reported Sept. 8 that CAMH senior researcher Robert Mann found that while suicide risk rose with alcohol consumption, as well as other factors like unemployment, the risk of suicide decreased when heavy drinkers joined Alcoholics Anonymous.

“These results suggest that a 1-liter increase in alcohol consumption led to an increase of 11 percent to 39 percent in suicides,” said Mann. “This observation is consistent with individual-level studies that show that heavy drinking, alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence increase a person’s risk of suicide substantially … However, it was heartening to see that increasing AA membership was related to reduced suicide mortality rates.”

The link between drinking and suicide was stronger among women than men, Mann noted.

Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide by Kay Redfield Jamison Read more about this title…

Difference in medical history classified by ICD-10 between male and female alcoholics.

The drinking history and current medical history of patients with alcohol dependence were surveyed in Japan and they were analyzed by demographics; gender, age and changes with time (2 stages).

The results showed that in the course of continued habitual drinking by patients with alcohol dependence, a wide range of physical complications occurred.

The main complications

• in men were gastrointestinal diseases and
• in women were mental and behavioral disorders, showing a gender difference in the medical history.

This result suggested that there is a high possibility that this will contribute to early discovery and early measures against alcohol related problems in women, which are difficult to bring out into the open.

Better alcohol education including mental health is important from an early age.

Nihon Arukoru Yakubutsu Igakkai Zasshi. 2008 Feb;43(1):25-34. Difference in medical history classified by ICD-10 between male and female alcoholics. Shinoda R, Mizukami Y, Nakagawa Y, Maruyama K.

See also;

• Brief-TSF is designed to address these issues.
• 12-Step Treatment More Effective than Alternative
• Subscribe to BriefTSF by e-Mail

Counseling the Culturally Diverse: Theory and Practice by Derald Wing Sue, David Sue Read more about this title…

Female drinkers lose brain volume more quickly than men, according to researchers at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

The BBC reported May 15 that researchers took CT scans of 150 women — about half of them alcoholics — and found that the heavy drinkers have smaller brains.

Female alcoholics were found to lose the same brain volume as male alcoholics, but suffered atrophy much more quickly.

“Women typically start drinking later in life, consume less … and one could reason that women are less affected by alcohol,” said lead study author Karl Mann. “But there is evidence for a faster progress of the events leading to dependence among female alcoholics and an earlier onset of adverse consequences of alcoholism. This suggests that women may be more vulnerable to chronic alcohol consumption.”

The findings were reported in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Epidemiological Research.

Mann, K., Ackermann, K., Croissant, B., Mundle, G., Nakovics, H., & Diehl, A. (2005) Neuroimaging of Gender Differences in Alcohol Dependence: Are Women More Vulnerable? Alcoholism: Clinical and Epidemiological Research, 29(5): 896-901.

From; Jointogether

Dimensions of social interaction among sober female participants in Alcoholics Anonymous.

The peer-led, voluntary fellowship, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), remains the predominant model for treatment within the field of substance abuse treatment and attainment of sobriety.

The social support network of AA has been documented as a powerful factor in the achievement of sobriety. However, for whom and in what manner does this social support network work?

This study examined the dimensions of

• perceived group,
• perceived personal, and overall
• perceived social support among 125 sober female members of AA using the Social Support Network Inventory (SSNI).

Of the SSNI’s five dimensions (available, practical, emotional, reciprocal, and sobriety-related social support), reciprocal support was the strongest contributor to group social support.

Those women who had a sponsor scored significantly higher in total social support and personal support.

Availability was the strongest contributor to both personal and overall perceived social support.

These findings indicate that availability and sponsorship are significant components of a supportive environment among women in sobriety.

Rush, M.M. Perceived social support: Dimensions of social interaction among sober female participants in Alcoholics Anonymous. Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association, 8(4):114-119, 2002.