The study used data from the National Health Interview Survey, administered by the U.S. The study included almost 25,000 respondents from 2018, about 31,000 from 2020 and almost 27,000 from 2022. New research, led by Lee and published Nov. 12 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that a spike in alcohol consumption among people in the U.S. in 2020 continued to rise slightly in 2021 and 2022.
- Our search was restricted to articles published in peer-reviewed journals, from December 1, 2019 to November 30, 2020.
- For example, getting regular exercise and practicing stress reduction techniques can help reduce symptoms.
- Sian Ferguson is a freelance health and cannabis writer based in Cape Town, South Africa.
- Alcohol use has added to the burden of the problem particularly among vulnerable groups like the adolescents, elderly, patients with cancer, as well as health professionals.
Myth 1: Consuming alcohol can destroy the virus
NIAAA’s free, research-based resources can help cut through the clutter and confusion about how alcohol affects people’s lives. No research suggests that you’ll develop long COVID if you drink alcohol while you have a COVID-19 infection. Consult a healthcare professional about whether you can drink alcohol while using these medications. If you’re ready to enter treatment and stop drinking, you’ll likely have to wait until your COVID-19 infection is no longer transmissible before you enter a detox program. A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed that alcohol use has continued to rise among Americans since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This decision has received a considerable amount of backlash from public officials and oral health experts.
Alcohol and risk for COVID-19 infection
However, in this study, the increase was significant only for females and not males when the analysis was separated by gender (Dumas et al., 2020). Please note the terminology to denote the time-period of the review changes from phrases such ‘pandemic’, ‘lockdown’, ‘social-distancing’ or ‘quarantine’ depending on the terminology used within the respective study being described. Likewise, the dates of the time periods for data collection vary for different countries depending on when quarantine measures were instituted. There is an increased need for treatment for alcohol and other substance use related problems during the pandemic. Increased targeting and evidence-based interventions will also be important in the period which follows this pandemic, to improve the quality of life for individuals and families, but also to prevent additional costs to society and health systems. It will also explain how alcohol consumption affects mental health and discuss some ways to treat the symptoms of depression and anxiety.
4. Participants’ Perceptions of Drinking Patterns Pre- and Post-COVID-19
Increased alcohol or other substance use may be responsible for some of this increase in depression. Whilst the increases in alcohol or other substance use are not of the same magnitude, most of the included studies showed increase in use and there were some notable consequences, such as marked increases in deaths from drug overdoses. Six studies reported a statistically significant role of younger age in increasing drug use during lockdown. Ballivian et al., (2020) report that being younger predicted drug use during quarantine.
“We know that alcohol is used as a coping mechanism for stress. What starts as a habit can become addictive or a substance disorder.” A surge of stress-related drinking and alcohol-related deaths brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. has not tapered off the way Dr. Brian Lee, a transplant hepatologist at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, had hoped. While research on post-COVID alcohol intolerance is still limited, anecdotal evidence suggests that it’s a symptom experienced by many people following the virus. Some evidence suggests that post-COVID-19 fatigue syndrome may share characteristics with ME/CFS, a condition where approximately 4 out of 5 people exhibit alcohol intolerance. Chhatwal agreed, adding that life stressors like financial insecurity, work pressure or other mental health struggles may contribute to the rise in alcohol consumption.
With regard to decreased alcohol consumption, higher social support 39, workers with higher conscientious domain of personality, those from educational, health, welfare sectors and those living with families reported lower alcohol consumption 54. A monthly cross-sectional survey in England that compared smoking and drinking practices for a year before and after lockdown found that, following lockdown, attempts to quit among smokers increased and alcohol use among high-risk drinkers reduced 55. The COVID-19 pandemic has also seen serious repercussions for vulnerable groups with substance use disorders (SUD), including alcohol 2. The pandemic has resulted in changes in patterns of drinking, an increase in alcohol withdrawal, disruption in access to care, and increase in illicit alcohol availability 3. It has also resulted in the disruption of a range of services, including emergency, treatment, and relapse prevention and liaison services for this population 4,5▪▪. The search and screening identified 45 articles from 513 deduplicated records.
However, due to the limited available data on post-COVID-19 alcohol intolerance, it’s unclear whether it’s a temporary or long-term symptom. Further research is needed to establish a clearer famous fas face understanding of this phenomenon. Several anecdotal reports suggest that alcohol intolerance may be linked to long COVID, specifically the post-viral fatigue syndrome (PVFS) type. Though the researchers couldn’t answer exactly why alcohol consumption was so high among the US adults surveyed, Lee has a few hypotheses. In a hospital based observational study in Spain, among 2078 COVID-19 patients evaluated across 3 months, prevalence of SUDs was 1.3%, primarily among males (85%).
Participants during COVID-19 reported consuming alcohol on an average of 12.2 days and 26.8 alcohol drinks over the past 30 days. Over a third (34.1%) reported engaging in binge drinking and seven percent reported engaging in extreme binge drinking. Those participants who reported being very or extremely impacted by COVID-19, consumed more alcohol (including both on more days and more total drinks) in the past 30 days. Moreover, nearly two-thirds of the participants reported that their drinking had increased compared to their consumption rates prior to COVID-19.
Five studies (11.1%) identified drug/ substance using longer questionnaires/instruments (seeTable 4). The remaining six studies (11.3%) used existing data and performed a time-series analysis linked to substance use (Glober et al., 2020, Leichtle et al., 2020, Marais et al., 2020, Ochalek et al., 2020, Slavova et al., 2020, Wainwright et al., 2020). In contrast, two studies found that women were significantly more likely to use alcohol than men during the pandemic. In a polish study of physicians, females used alcohol more often and drank more standard drinks per occasion. However, this study did report that males binged more during the pandemic (Silczuk, 2020). In a large study with teenagers in Canada, there was an overall increase in the frequency of alcohol use.
Reports of consuming alcohol based sanitiser and leading to methanol toxicity were reported 101. Studies from emergency departments in Ireland and United States (US) reported overall reductions in psychiatric and alcohol-related emergencies due to lockdown orders 16,17. In a hospital-based study from the US, whereas there was significant reduction in motor vehicle accidents during the pandemic, alcohol-related motor vehicle accidents relatively increased 18,19. As there are some countries in the second wave at the time of this review, we need newer protocols and cohorts to study the long-term effects on mental health and addiction of different populations 123.