Alcoholism is not just a 'man's disease' anymore

He noted that U.S. immigrants from cultures with conservative values vis-à-vis drinking tend to adhere to their own cultural norms, while their children are likely to adopt U.S. norms, which are comparatively lax regarding alcohol.

“We can think of U.S. culture as having been traditionally dominated by white men,” added Grucza. “As women have ‘immigrated’ into this culture, they have become ‘acculturated’ with regard to alcohol use. But Black women – who still have the lowest rates of drinking among the demographic groups we looked at – have a second barrier between them and the dominant U.S. culture, namely, their race, that may be keeping them from adopting the standards of the dominant culture with respect to alcohol use.”

Greenfield suggested that specially designed prevention programs that target female drinkers might help to lower drinking rates, and also delay the age of drinking initiation, which could help prevent later alcohol problems. “It would also be helpful to educate women about the gender differences in metabolism of alcohol, and the associated heightened female vulnerability to alcohol’s adverse health consequences at lower doses than men,” she said.

Grucza agreed that interventions for women need further investigation. “Whenever we see change in a disorder in the population, there is an opportunity to take a closer look at which risk factors for the disorder might be changing at the same time,” he said. “The classic example of this would be the rise in lung cancer in the late 20th century, a time in which sales of commercially produced cigarettes also skyrocketed. In this case, we obviously wouldn’t want to change the progress made by women over the last 50 - 60 years, but we can look at specific changes in their drinking behavior and start to speculate about what interventions might work.”

Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research (ACER) is the official journal of the Research Society on Alcoholism and the International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism. Co-authors of the ACER paper, “Secular Trends in the Lifetime Prevalence of Alcohol Dependence in the United States: A Re-Evaluation,” were: Kathleen K. Bucholz, John P. Rice, and Laura J. Bierut of the Department of Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.