Funding: NIAAA R01AA021448
Project PI: William Kerr, PhD
Project PI: William C. Kerr
Establishing causal relationships between alcohol consumption, drinking patterns and common health problems is important for health education of consumers, alcohol policy and regulation, prevention programming and cost estimates for health services.
While a large body of literature has addressed this topic, the conclusions that can be drawn have been limited by shortcomings in three important and inter-related areas: poor measurement of alcohol intake and limited assessment of life-course drinking and abstention; lack of attention to the influence of health problems on subsequent alcohol patterns; and inadequate treatment of potentially confounding health risk factors, such as childhood adversity and economic hardship, and health behaviors such as tobacco use, drug use, and exercise. There has also been limited attention to racial/ethnic differences in the inter-relationships of alcohol and health, despite suggestive evidence of such.
To address these issues and gaps in the extant literature, the study will conduct new analyses of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1979 and 1997 cohorts and of the 2010 National Alcohol Survey (NAS).
Results will provide new insights into inter-relationships between alcohol use and heath by avoiding common misclassification problems that undermine the validity of most previous research linking alcohol with health outcomes. Study findings will document the prevalence, severity and impact on future drinking of general and alcohol-attributed health problems, provide estimates of alcohol pattern risks for specific health conditions and overall health status, and will provide estimates of impacts of childhood adversity and economic losses in the recent recession on these health outcomes.
