Large study links alcohol misuse to subsequent injury risk in young people

The immediate effects of drinking too much alcohol are obvious, unpleasant and can even be life threatening, but a new study has shown that young people who drink excessively, to the degree that they are admitted into hospital because of it, are also at a much higher risk of sustaining injuries in the following 6 months. It's the first time the detailed epidemiology of the association between heavy drinking in adolescence and subsequent injury risk after a hospital admission has been described. The NIHR-funded research, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, calls for more to be done to raise awareness of this strong link among both young people and among health professionals. The researchers looked at the primary care medical records and hospital admission records of around 120,000 young people aged between 10 and 24 in the 15 year period between 1998 and 2013. Of those, just over 11,000 had been admitted to hospital because of alcohol and the rest had not. 18.9% of the alcohol admission cohort were subsequently admitted to hospital for an injury during the study follow-up period compared to just 2.6% of the others. The most common type of injury was poisoning (e.g.intentional self poisoning ), inanimate mechanical forces (e.g.struck by a falling object) and animate forces (e.g.hit by another person).