Racial/Ethnic disparities in the risk of injury related to the frequency of heavy drinking occasions

Background: Although a well-documented literature from studies in hospital emergency rooms has established the association of injury with drinking prior to the event, less is known about the risks from various drinking patterns injury or how representative these data are of the general population.

Methods: Data are from the 2010 National Alcohol Survey. Analyses utilize Cox proportional hazards models with age as the timescale in a retrospective cohort design. Life-course drinking is determined by age of onset and questions on heavy drinking by decade of life. The outcome measure is having had a serious injury at a certain age. Models estimate the risk of injury in relation to heavy drinking in each year controlling for demographics, risk taking and time varying measures of smoking and chronic disease.

Results: Results indicate that the risk of injury increases with the frequency of heavy drinking days to a hazard ratio of 2.14 (1.45-3.14) for daily heavy drinkers. Risks for white respondents were similar but different risk relationships were found for black respondents among whom only daily heavy drinkers had increased risk of 4.09 (2.11-7.93), and for Hispanic respondents where elevated risk was seen among yearly heavy drinkers 2.71 (1.29-5.68), with a similar risk estimate for monthly heavy drinkers but lower and non-significant risks found for more frequency heavy drinking categories.

Conclusions: Different risk relationship were found across race/ethnicity groups suggesting elevated risk with less frequent heavy drinking among Hispanic respondents and very high risk from daily heavy drinking among black respondents.