The survey, published in the May issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, also found that four out of five episodes of alcohol-impaired driving were reported by people who also reported binge drinking, defined as consuming five or more drinks or more than one occasion.
"After years of gentle steady progress in the 1990s we are now heading in the wrong direction," said Kyran Quinlan, M.D., M.P.H., clinical associate in pediatrics at the University of Chicago, who worked with colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on this report. "This tells us that we urgently need new strategies to prevent alcohol-impaired driving with special emphasis on reducing binge drinking."
"This is not just a statistical bump or noise in the data," he added. "This is a true behavioral change."
The authors point out that motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death in the United States for people between the ages of 1 and 34. Thirty percent of Americans will be involved in an alcohol-related crash in their lifetimes. Such accidents cause damages worth more than $50 billion a year.
"Deaths from alcohol-related crashes had been declining for years," added Quinlan, "but around 1999 they stopped going down, despite safer cars and highways."
The researchers, all based at the time at the CDC, analyzed telephone surveys with more than 100,000 people in the United States in 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999 and 2002. Respondents, aged 18 or older, were asked about
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Contact: John Easton
John.Easton@uchospitals.edu
773-702-6241
University of Chicago Medical Center
19-Apr-2005