MONDAY, March 21 2022 (HealthDay Information) — Drawback ingesting led to greater than 232 million missed work days a yr in the USA earlier than the pandemic, and the scenario seemingly grew to become worse with extra folks working at dwelling, a brand new examine suggests.
“Alcohol use disorder is a serious downside in the USA and an enormous downside in lots of workplaces, the place it contributes to a major variety of workdays missed,” mentioned senior investigator Dr. Laura Bierut, a professor of psychiatry at Washington College in St. Louis.
“The issue seemingly has worsened throughout the pandemic, and we have to attempt to do extra to make sure that folks can get the assistance they should cope with alcohol use dysfunction,” she mentioned.
Bierut mentioned employers and policymakers have an financial incentive to deal with the difficulty.
For the brand new examine, her group analyzed information from greater than 110,000 U.S. adults with full-time jobs who participated in a nationwide survey on drug use and well being from 2015 to 2019.
Simply over 9% — equal to just about 11 million full-time employees nationwide — met the factors for alcohol use dysfunction, outlined as the lack to cease or management ingesting regardless of the hurt to social life, work life or well being.
Though folks with alcohol use dysfunction represented about 9.3% of examine contributors, they accounted for 14.1% of whole office absences.
Folks with extreme alcohol use dysfunction reported lacking 32 days of labor every year due to sickness, harm or just skipping work, in contrast with nearly 18 days for these with delicate alcohol use dysfunction and about 13 days for these with out the dysfunction.
General, employees with alcohol use disorder missed greater than 232 million work days yearly, in line with findings printed on-line March 17 in JAMA Network Open.
Alcohol use dysfunction was extra frequent amongst males, youthful folks, white folks and Hispanics, and people with decrease incomes.
“We particularly selected to cease our information evaluation the yr earlier than the pandemic started in order that we might be extra assured in our findings,” mentioned first writer Dr. Ian Parsley, a psychiatry resident at Washington College in St. Louis.
Having extra folks working at dwelling may change the associations researchers noticed earlier than the pandemic started, he mentioned.
“The quantity of alcohol consumed since folks have been working from dwelling extra has actually simply gone by way of the roof,” Parsley mentioned. “That’s not one thing that’s simply going to resolve itself, whilst we slowly come out of this pandemic.”
Extra data
There’s extra on alcohol use dysfunction on the U.S. Nationwide Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
SOURCE: Washington College, information launch, March 17, 2022
