“Lifetime income patterns and alcohol con…tories and drinking.” Social Science alcoholism statistics & Medicine, October 2011. Arecent 2019 studyfound that adding an additional 3.61 years of schooling generally led to a 50% reduced risk of alcohol dependence. Since the brain is not fully developed until the age of 25, young adults should exercise caution when consuming alcohol. 10.3 million LGBT+ adults had a substance use disorder and/or mental illness in 2020. While younger people are more likely to use drugs, the rate of drug use among people over 40 is increasing faster than it is among younger age groups.
- These statistics on alcohol were provided by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
- This has been a sharp reversal from previous recommendations that moderate drinking could offer some protective benefits.
- Drinking a bit more than the recommended units of alcohol once in a while may not be very bad for your health, but both binge drinking and heavy drinking can cause significant health damage.
- Factoring in all drinkers, including those who did not drink in the past week, the average number of drinks consumed over the past seven days is 2.8, the lowest figure Gallup has recorded since 1996.
- Firefighters also reported drinking alcoholten days per month on average, or about half of their off-duty days.
Research & Data
Arecent survey conducted by The Recovery Villagefound that alcohol use in general increases as household income increases. Looking into specific drinking patterns, a2012 studyalso found that lower-income households are more likely to either not drink at all or have heavy drinking episodes. Higher-income households are more likely to drink lighter amounts of alcohol more frequently. The term alcohol use disorder can be used interchangeably with alcoholism, alcohol dependence oralcohol addiction.
- Understanding how alcohol misuse breaks down by age group is important because interventions can then be more precisely targeted.
- Even states with smaller populations like North Dakota experience substantial economic strain, with alcohol-related costs nearing half a billion dollars annually.
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The Recovery Village Atlanta
Alcohol statistics show that 80% of college graduates in the United States drink alcohol, in comparison to only 52% of individuals who did not attend college. This suggests that young adults who have received a higher level of education are more likely to become addicted to alcohol. A report from the CDC disclosed that underage alcoholism is the cause of Alcohol Use Disorder death in 3,900 people under age 21 every year. Alcoholism is also responsible for an estimated 210,000 years of potential life lost in young people under age 21 every year.
Heightened Risk of Disease
In 2024, lifetime consumption declined in all three grade levels, reaching historic low levels. Sixty-seven percent of American teens have never consumed alcohol, a clear indication of success in delaying the onset of underage drinking. In recent years, binge drinking has also emerged as a concerning trend, with one in six adults binge drinking about four times a month. Strikingly, younger adults, particularly those aged 18-25, exhibit the highest rates of binge drinking, with nearly 50% reporting recent consumption of alcohol. The 178,000 annual deaths from excessive alcohol use highlight an urgent public health crisis.
Addiction Treatment
In 2018, 5.1% of adults engaged in heavy drinking in the past year, 15.5% engaged in moderate drinking, 45.7% engaged in light drinking, and 33.7% did not consume alcohol (Figure 1). Health is the state of physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. This category includes metrics such as life expectancy, infant mortality rate, disease prevalence, and access to healthcare. The improvement was, however, not consistent across all population groups or regions of the country. In 2023, white people were the only racial/ethnic population group that experienced a statistically significant decrease in drug overdose deaths; other population groups had nonsignificant changes or increases. This breakdown also follows the national trend of an overall reduction in reported excessive alcohol consumption.
Alcohol-Attributable Acute Deaths (2016-
Americans’ drinking habits are shifting amid the medical world’s reappraisal of alcohol’s health effects. Compounding the challenge for companies that sell alcohol, drinkers now appear to be dialing back how much they drink, as well. For the first time in Gallup’s trend, a majority of Americans, 53%, say drinking in moderation, or “one or two drinks a day,” is bad for one’s health.