Problem Drinking Led to Millions of Missed Workdays

MONDAY, March 21 2022 (HealthDay News) — Problem ingesting led to greater than 232 million missed work days a yr within the United States earlier than the pandemic, and the scenario possible turned worse with extra individuals working at house, a brand new examine suggests.

“Alcohol use disorder is a major problem in the United States and a big problem in many workplaces, where it contributes to a significant number of workdays missed,” stated senior investigator Dr. Laura Bierut, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The problem likely has worsened during the pandemic, and we need to try to do more to ensure that people can get the help they need to deal with alcohol use disorder,” she said.

Bierut said employers and policymakers have an economic incentive to address the issue.

For the new study, her team analyzed data from more than 110,000 U.S. adults with full-time jobs who participated in a national survey on drug use and health from 2015 to 2019.

Just over 9% — equal to nearly 11 million full-time workers nationwide — met the criteria for alcohol use disorder, defined as the inability to stop or control drinking despite the harm to social life, work life or health.

Although people with alcohol use disorder represented about 9.3% of study participants, they accounted for 14.1% of total workplace absences.

People with severe alcohol use disorder reported missing 32 days of work each year because of illness, injury or simply skipping work, compared with almost 18 days for those with mild alcohol use disorder and about 13 days for those without the disorder.

Overall, workers with alcohol use disorder missed more than 232 million work days annually, according to findings published online March 17 in JAMA Network Open.

Alcohol use disorder was more common among men, younger people, white people and Hispanics, and those with lower incomes.

“We specifically chose to stop our data analysis the year before the pandemic began so that we could be more confident in our findings,” stated first creator Dr. Ian Parsley, a psychiatry resident at Washington University in St. Louis.

Having extra individuals working at house might change the associations researchers noticed earlier than the pandemic started, he stated.

“The quantity of alcohol consumed since individuals have been working from house extra has actually simply gone by way of the roof,” Parsley stated. “That’s not one thing that’s simply going to resolve itself, at the same time as we slowly come out of this pandemic.”

More data

There’s extra on alcohol use dysfunction on the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

SOURCE: Washington University, information launch, March 17, 2022