A study published in JAMA Network Open unveiled the trend of hospitalizations associated with alcohol use disorder in the United States. The new data showed an increase in hospitalizations from alcohol use disorder over the last two decades.
In the study, a group of American researchers from the University of Alabama examined data derived from the U.S. National Inpatient Sample (NIS) database.
The data ran from 1998 through 2016, sampling more than 5,000,000 hospitalized patients with alcohol use disorder, about 106,000 of which were pronounced deceased as a result of health complications.
As researchers analyzed the data, they determined that there was a slight increase, about 3.5 percent, in the rate of hospitalizations caused by alcohol use disorder from 1998 to 2016.
“There was 3.5% increase in the rate of AUD hospitalizations from 1998 to 2016, showing a decline first until 2005 then an increase through 2015,” the co-authors wrote in their journal article.
“Although AUD hospitalizations increased minimally, the overall health care impact of AUD is substantial,” they concluded. “Both of these findings were consistent with our a priori hypotheses.”
The study’s lead author had a number of conflicts of interest. The study was funded by the Division of Rheumatology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the Birmingham VA Medical Center.
