Source: Thailand Medical News Jan 10, 2020 4 years, 11 months, 1 week, 5 days, 21 hours, 38 minutes ago
A new large study of
Chinese adults, published by the scientific journal
Addiction, has found that eight percent of
men in
China are
problem drinkers, and that
problem drinking is more prevalent among
men of lower socio-economic status and in rural areas.
Problem drinking is associated with significantly increased risk of physical and mental health problems and premature death.
Alcohol consumption has become more prevalent in
China in recent years but limited large-scale epidemiological evidence has made it difficult to know the true scale of the problem until now.
Medical researchers from Oxford University, Peking University, and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences led a large collaborative study of over 500,000
men and women aged 30-79 years from ten rural and urban areas in
China. Women in the study drank little
alcohol, but a third of men drank
alcohol regularly and one in four of these men experienced at least one indicator of
problem drinking.
The term '
problem drinking' was defined by self-report as one or more of the following indicators in the past month:
drinking in the morning, being unable to work or to do anything due to
drinking, negative emotions after
drinking, being unable to avoid
drinking, or having the shakes when stopping
drinking.
Dr Pek Kei Im, of the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford and co-author told
Thailand Medical News, "In
China, the patterns of
drinking differ from Western populations. Our study shows that
problem drinking is fairly common among
Chinese men, particularly among more disadvantaged groups."
The study showed that compared with low-risk drinkers,
men with
problem drinking had poorer self-reported health, poorer life satisfaction, more sleep problems, and a higher risk of depression and anxiety. Men with two or more
problem drinking indicators had an approximately two-fold higher risk for all-cause mortality and a 15% higher risk for hospitalisation compared with low-risk drinkers. Professor Zhengming Chen, co-author from the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford, says: "This large collaborative study has shown that
drinking alcohol can result in significant adverse consequences, for both mental and physical health and wellbeing."
Research has shown that the prevalence of
alcohol dependence in
China i
ncreased from 0.02% to 0.68% between the 1980s and 1990s, and per capita
alcohol consumption increased from 4.1L in 2005 to 7.2L in 2016, whereas in Europe per capita consumption decreased from 12.3L to 9.8L over the same period.
Dr. Iona Millwood, of the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford and co-author added, "
Drinking has been on the rise in
China since the 1980s, and now we're looking at a significant national health problem that is beginning to resemble those in Western countries. Knowing the scale of the problem, and the fact that it's more intense in rural and poorer areas, can help to inform policy decisions to improve health outcomes in
China."
Reference : Pek Kei Im et al, Problem drinking, wellbeing and mortality risk in Chinese men: findings from the China Kadoorie Biobank, Addiction (2019). DOI: 10.1111/add.14873
