Feature Channels: Alcohol and Alcoholism

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The presence of peers is a key prompt for alcohol cravings among young people, according to a new study in Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research. When certain settings, people, or items—a bar, a friend, a glass—are paired with alcohol, they can become conditioned cues, eliciting drinking cravings. These learned reactions are associated with alcohol use disorder (AUD), treatment outcomes, and relapse. Adolescents and emerging adults are particularly susceptible to peer influence. In real-world settings, studies have found that the presence of peers predicts young people’s intensifying drinking cravings at the moment. In laboratory studies, however, peer influence is largely absent, potentially limiting the usefulness of their findings. Better understanding peers as alcohol cues could inform more effective AUD prevention and treatment programs. For the current study, researchers from Brown University, RI, evaluated alcohol cravings among youth in the human laboratory, using drinking-

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People who reported feeling more affective empathy on a given day than was typical for them were likely to drink more than usual, according to a study published in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research. Notably, these daily shifts in affective empathy levels were associated with the number of drinks consumed even after controlling for daily shifts in positive and negative emotions. This means that the association between affective empathy and alcohol use was not explained by shifts in emotional states. Overall, the findings indicate that changes in an individual’s affective empathy on a day-to-day basis may be important to understand alcohol use.

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Researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine have discovered alternative gene splicing, which occurs during gene expression, can impact a person's risk of alcohol use disorder (AUD). They recently published their findings in Molecular Psychiatry.

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Living in a neighborhood with bars or government-run alcohol outlets may increase suicidal behavior among young adults, especially men and those with elevated genetic liability for attempting suicide, a new study suggests. The paper, in Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research, is the latest attempt to clarify the link between alcohol accessibility and suicidal behavior. This complex relationship is proving difficult to unravel. Both acute drinking and alcohol use disorder are associated with increased suicide risk, potentially because of behavioral inhibition, depressed mood, or aggression. The link between heavy drinking and suicidal behavior likely reflects, in part, genetic and environmental influences, including the proximity of alcohol outlets. Research has been inconclusive, however. For the new study, drawing on the experiences of hundreds of thousands of individuals in Sweden, investigators explored the association between neighborhood alcohol outlets and suicide attempts and

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Working the night shift or binge drinking may double the risk of COVID-19 infection, according to a study of nurses published in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research. Both alcohol misuse and night shift work have been shown to impact sleep and promote inflammation in the body, which has been linked to COVID disease severity. The findings from this study strongly suggest that alcohol and circadian misalignment contribute to the development of COVID disease in people exposed to the virus.

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The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is hosting an online panel on Thursday, June 1 at noon EDT, to discuss a new report highlighting the dangerous intersection of alcohol misuse and gun violence. The report, “Alcohol Misuse and Gun Violence: An Evidence Based Approach,” was released earlier this month by the Consortium for Risk-Based Firearm Policy, a group of leading experts that advances evidence-based gun violence prevention policies, and the Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

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Penn Medicine is launching a new community mental health hub at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania — Cedar Avenue (HUP Cedar), co-locating inpatient and outpatient psychiatric care with a new crisis response center (CRC) at the facility. The multi-year plan will put crucial psychiatric and substance use care in easy reach for West and Southwest Philadelphia residents, at a time when both mental illness and drug and alcohol dependence are surging in the city.

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Researchers from the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released a set of state-based policy recommendations to address the intersection of alcohol use and firearms.

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A new study from Keck Medicine of USC published in the Annals of Internal Medicine shows that heavy alcohol use may be dramatically more damaging to the liver for people with metabolic syndrome.

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Indiana University's Sina Kianersi, a recent School of Public Health-Bloomington doctoral candidate, has developed the first open-source model to translate transdermal alcohol content into information that can be used by researchers.

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In a new report, American Cancer Society researchers discovered both favorable and unfavorable changes in major cancer risk factors, preventive behaviors and services, and screenings in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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People with anxiety or major depressive disorders experience more alcohol-related symptoms and problems than people without those disorders, even at the same levels of drinking, according to a large study. This finding might help to explain why those who develop an anxiety or mood disorder are at heightened risk of alcohol use disorder (AUD).

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One in five adults in California, or an estimated 6.5 million people, are concerned that someone they know, usually a friend or family member, is at risk of harming themselves or others, according to new research published in Preventive Medicine. Alcohol and substance misuse, a history of violence, and firearm access were common reasons for concerns about potential violence.

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People who first experience problems with alcohol after the age of 60 may have better mental health functioning than those whose drinking problems start sooner, and the benefits of alcohol treatment are not conditional on when hazardous drinking began, a new study suggests.

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People who live in countries with more stringent alcohol policies drank less than people in countries with less strict policies, according to a large multi-country analysis published in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research. The more stringent policies were associated with reduced drinking overall and showed more significant associations in drinkers aged 18 to 24 and those with 13 or fewer years of education. The findings suggest that countries could reduce adverse health consequences by adopting cost-effective alcohol policies.

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Researcher will discuss the study which involved a sleeping aid known as suvorexant that is already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for insomnia, hints at the potential of sleep medications to slow or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

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A new study shows promise for reducing risky drinking among Army National Guard members over the long term, potentially improving their health and readiness to serve. The number of days each month that Guard members said they had been binge-drinking dropped by up to half over the course of a year of either online only education or online and peer-based support.

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The relationship between alcohol use and burn injuries is a negative one in multiple ways. Not only are about 50% of adults who sustain burn injuries intoxicated at the time of injury, suggesting that alcohol use may have contributed to the incident, but alcohol use among burn-injured patients is associated with more severe complications, delayed recovery, and increased morbidity and mortality.

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A multi-disciplinary team of Indiana University researchers is focusing their efforts on a growing public health concern: binge and “high-intensity” drinking—extreme drinking behaviors that are increasingly prevalent among college-age adults.

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New research from the University at Buffalo provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of drinking patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic and their association with four clinically prevalent mental health disorders in the U.S.

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Increasing the proportion of non-alcoholic drinks on sale in online supermarkets could reduce the amount of alcohol people purchase, suggests a study published today led by researchers at the University of Cambridge.

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Heavy alcohol use creates a vicious cycle: It changes signaling pathways in the brain, which in turn affects cognitive functions like decision-making and impulse control — and makes the individual more likely to drink. The mechanism behind this may involve the brain’s immune system, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

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From septic shock to sticker shock. Keep up with this ever-growing, changing sector. Below are some of the latest stories on healthcare on Newswise.

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New research led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis identifies a common genetic signature that may increase a person's risk of developing substance use disorders. The work eventually could lead to universal therapies to treat multiple substance use disorders and potentially help people diagnosed with more than one.

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In a recent analysis, researchers found sex differences in the health and neurodevelopmental outcomes of people exposed to alcohol before birth.

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A tool allowing research participants to self-identify beyond binary categories of male and female performed well in a study of college student drinking. The study, published in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research, demonstrates a method to conduct research that is more inclusive of the increasing number of individuals identifying as transgender, nonbinary, and other genders who may be at higher risk for alcohol use disorders. The study encourages the development of future research instruments that capture a broader diversity of genders in order to promote a more representative body of scientific knowledge and a more complete understanding of health influences and outcomes.

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Over the past 20 years, the death rate from drug poisonings in the U.S. has tripled and suicide and alcoholic liver disease death rates have increased by 30 percent — particularly among middle-aged white Americans. Daniel Hungerman, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, and his co-authors studied the connection between a sharp downturn of religious participation in the late 1980s and the swift rise in these "deaths of despair" among white Americans ages 45 to 54 in the early 1990s.

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A shot of a liver-produced hormone called FGF21 sobered up mice that had passed out from alcohol, allowing them to regain consciousness and coordination much faster than those that didn’t receive this treatment, UT Southwestern researchers report in a new study. The findings, published in Cell Metabolism, could lead to effective treatments for acute alcohol intoxication, which is responsible for about 1 million emergency room visits in the U.S. each year.

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For people with alcohol use disorder (AUD), there is a constant, vicious cycle between changes to the brain and changes to behavior. AUD can alter signaling pathways in the brain; in turn, those changes can exacerbate drinking.

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A new national study published in BMC Public Health suggests that problematic social media use in early adolescents is associated with both positive and negative alcohol beliefs, which play a key role in predicting alcohol use and, potentially, the development of alcohol use disorder later in life.

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Fluctuating impulsivity in college students is linked to increased positive thoughts about alcohol, heavier drinking, and more negative consequences, a new study suggests—information that could inform more effective intervention programs to reduce alcohol harm. Almost a third of young adults report binge drinking in the past month, and 16% meet criteria for alcohol use disorder in the past year. Impulsivity, a tendency to act rashly without considering consequences, is known to be associated with heavier drinking. A predictive behavioral model theorizes that impulsive people are particularly predisposed to certain beliefs about alcohol and that this influences their consumption. These beliefs—alcohol expectancies—determine how individuals perceive the positive and negative effects of drinking. Positive expectancies (e.g., increased sociability) are linked to higher alcohol use, while negative expectancies (e.g., becoming impaired) are thought to restrain drinking behavior. Recent resea

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Adults with Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) seeking to moderate their drinking respond differently to interventions depending on their age, a new study suggests.

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Newly arrived immigrants drank decreasing amounts of alcohol in their first two years in the United States, according to a study of Latino immigrants living in Miami-Dade County in Florida.

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A computer-based intervention associated with reduced binge drinking episodes among high school students could yield a cost savings of eight thousand euros, according to a Spanish study published in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research. The study found the computer-based intervention cost-effective, resulting in societal savings of €8,000 for each binge drinking episode averted. Computer and web-based interventions can potentially reach a far larger number of students than face-to-face screening and intervention.