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| Posted: 17 May 2005 18:04 | ||
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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Alcohol-impaired driving appears to be on the increase again, reversing a long, slow downward trend, new study findings indicate.
In both 2002 and 1999, there were nearly 160 million instances of self-reported alcohol-impaired driving -- a 37 percent increase from 1997, the study shows. The study also shows that the increase in alcohol-impaired driving was accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of individuals who reported binge drinking. "After years of gentle steady progress in the 1990s we are now heading in the wrong direction," study author Dr. Kyran P. Quinlan said in a statement. "This tells us that we urgently need new strategies to prevent alcohol-impaired driving with special emphasis on reducing binge drinking." In 2002 alone, more than 17,000 people died and about 258,000 injuries resulted from alcohol-related crashes. Further, there were 1.5 million arrests for alcohol-impaired driving. If we continue at the present rate, researchers estimate, approximately 30 percent of Americans will be involved in an alcohol-related crash at least once in their lifetime. Quinlan and his colleagues analyzed trends in self-reported alcohol-impaired driving in the United States from 1993 to 2002 using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their findings are based on interviews of more than 100,000 individuals each year. In 1993, 2.5 percent of study participants admitted to driving at least one time in the previous month when they "had perhaps too much to drink," but by 1997 this proportion dropped to 2.1 percent. Just two years later, however, 2.4 percent of study participants reported alcohol-impaired driving, as did 2.3 percent in 2002. Likewise, the total number of cases of alcohol-impaired driving decreased to 116 million in 1997 from 123 million in 1993, but then rose to 159 million in 1999 and remained at that high level in 2002, the researchers report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. What's more, the majority of those who admitted to alcohol-impaired driving also reported binge drinking. "This tells us that we need to get beyond stopping drinking drivers on the road," Quinlan told Reuters Health. "Finding effective ways to address the underlying drinking patterns could help to combat this problem." The incidence and rate of alcohol-impaired driving is likely to be even higher than that reported in the current study, the authors speculate, since some individuals may be reluctant to admit to such potentially illegal activity, while others may simply deny their being impaired after drinking. The investigators did not investigate the reasons for the increase in alcohol-impaired driving or binge drinking, however. "It is possible that, as a country, we thought we were done with this problem, and that it was going away," Quinlan speculated. "We may have become complacent, and now drinking and driving and all the dangers associated with it are coming back," he told Reuters Health. SOURCE: American Journal of Preventive Medicine, May 2005. |
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