What do you know about alcohol?

Alcohol can be a tough topic, because it is so widely used but can also be very dangerous. Here are a few things you may not know about alcohol.

According to a study conducted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, analyzing trends from 2019, nearly 26% of people ages 18 and older reported binge drinking in the past month. Among American youth, nearly 15 million people ages 12 and older suffered from alcohol use disorder (AUD), with approximately 414,000 adolescents ages 12 to 17 (1.7 percent of the entire age group) beset by AUD. Conversely, around 10.5% of children in the U.S. ages 17 and younger live with a parent suffering from AUD. 

In the realm of emergencies and deaths, recent years have seen a considerable rise in alcohol-related emergency department (ED) visits, increasing 47% between 2006 and 2014. Among ED visits overall, 18.5% percent of them are due to alcohol. Moreover, 22.1% of overdose deaths involving prescription opioids themselves have alcohol has a contributing factor. 

Generally, alcohol ranks as the third leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States, behind tobacco (first) and obesity (second), with approximately 95,000 deaths annually. Of these, 10,265 results from alcohol-related driving fatalities. In all, alcohol presents a range of risks and disorders—both widespread without being widely understood—demanding greater attention.