As the title shows, the article Vital Signs: Binge Drinking Among Women and High School Girls - United States, 2011 reviews the drinking habits of women and high school girls in 2011. It was found that during the years 2001 - 2005, binge drinking lead to many health and social complications such as unintentional injuries, heart disease, and alcohol dependence. Binge drinking also contributed to the numbers of sexually transmitted infections, miscarriages, etc. that was already prevalent in the United States. These complications usually ended with death. The article states that "reducing the prevalence of binge drinking among adults and youths is a leading health indicator in Healthy People 2020." In moving towards these goals, the CDC used data from the 2011 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and the 2011 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) to monitor binge drinking among women and high school girls.
BFRSS is a telephone survey system that works annually to collect information on the health of US civilians 18 years and older. The CDC's binge drinking analysis included 278,243 women in the United States. Binge drinking was defined by the CDC as women who had "four or more alcoholic drinks per occasion during the past 30 days." They found that the prevalence of binge drinking in women 18 years and older in 2011 was 12.5% and the frequency among these women was 3.2 episodes per month and 5.7 drinks per occasion. The prevalence among women 18 to 24 years old was 24.2% and the percentage increased with age. Women 18 to 24 years old also had the highest frequency and intensity of binge drinking: 3.6 episode and 6.4 drinks.
YRBS monitors health risk behaviors that may lead to death and disability among youth and adults through surveys. The analysis that the CDC collected from them showed that the prevalence of binge drinking among girls from grades 9 to 12 was 19.8%. In contrast to binge drinking among women, binge drinking among high school girls increased with grade.
Binge drinking is an important public health issue because it greatly affects the health of not only the people who consume alcohol, but also others who have any association (whether intentional or not) with drinkers. Just drinking alcohol to point of being drunk has high consequences like the accidents and deaths caused by drunk driving. Binge drinking can lead to even more serious problems for drinkers, like unintended pregnancies and the results of adverse reproductive health. There is greater exposure to alcoholic drinks due to marketing and the ease of obtaining them. As this exposure increases, so does mortality among youth and adults; those who drink as well as those who do not.
Although I am sure the results from the BFRSS and the YRBS are not totally representative, they still do not surprise me. The survey method has many advantages that make it possible to have current data but it also has disadvantages that take away from the reliability of the results. In using national telephone and paper surveys, the BFRSS are able to reach more people in the whole of the US than they would have in any other way. They also decrease the risks of experimenter bias and are more efficient that any other experiment method. However, the data gathered may not be very reliable since it depends on the honesty of the surveyors. These results also suffer from recall bias since the surveys require the surveyors to recall information that is at least a month old. Alcohol affects memory among other things, so a person may only recall drinking 3 times when in fact, they drank 6 times.
To reduce the prevalence of binge drinking in college and high school students, I would make sure that the dangers are emphasized more in their surroundings: classrooms, school buildings, dorms, etc. I would also appeal to them through ads available in social media. Lastly, since people are more responsive to warnings that relate to them, I would try to address risk factors that are more common in certain areas. For example, in an area where unplanned pregnancies are more common, I would put up posters showing the correlation between binge drinking and unplanned pregnancies.
I like how you laid out the risks of binge drinking in women, specifically when you said that binge drinking not only effects the drinker, but also the people around her. This is especially true in places like college campuses, and I think it is important to stress that fact.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with you on how to reduce, or even prevent binge drinking. In addition to raising awareness about the risks and harms of binge drinking, I also think that a way to reduce the problem would be to make the consumption or purchase of alcohol harder. Two ways that I thought about doing this are by increasing the prices of alcohol, and by decreasing the alcohol content in each bottle of alcohol. The combination of raising awareness/education and making the purchase of alcohol harder could greatly diminish the number of binge drinking women in the US.
Overall, very well laid out, good job!
Your responses were comprehensive.
ReplyDeleteFor Qn3, I am not sure what you mean when you say that surveys are more efficient than any other experiment method. Did you have a particular method in mind?
And for Qn4, while communication methods are great, combining it with changes in the alcohol distribution mechanism is more likely to bring sustainable change. Like the examples in the article.