79% of women in England reported drinking in the last year and average alcohol consumption among women is nine units a week. Around one in seven women drink more than the Chief Medical Officers’ weekly low risk guideline (14 units a week). Anyone who has struggled to overcome alcohol dependence or an alcohol abuse problem knows how difficult aprocess recovery can be. But the evidence suggests that women are just as likely to recover as men once theybegin treatment—a glimmer of hope that may make the journey to recovery worth trying.
How to cut down your risks from drinking
In addition to childcare and financial issues, other factors may present as impediments to women’s treatment seeking and use. Social stigma, lack of awareness regarding treatment options, concerns about confrontational approaches that were pervasive in male-dominated traditional substance abuse treatment, co-occurring mental disorders or a history of trauma and victimization, as well as homelessness all present possible barriers for women. Women are more at risk with alcohol use disorder because of higher risk of liver disease, breast cancer, osteoporosis and mental health issues. A substantial gap remains in the literature for rigorous studies thataddress both historical and developmental variation. Most of our understanding oftrends in drinking among women, especially among adults, is based on relativelyshort historical windows and broad age categories.
Behavioral Signs
Liver enzymes which process alcohol and medication lose effectiveness with age, and the central nervous system becomes more sensitive. This poses a greater problem for older women who drink, as older women tend to take more medication 30. Older women are also more likely to experience falls than older men, the risk of which is also increased by certain medications 31,32. Out of all individuals in substance use treatment, a greater proportion of women reported either living with a child or being a parent when they started treatment compared with men (58% of women, 48% of men) 17. This is one example of why gender equity is an important consideration in the design of treatment services.
Do Women Face Higher Risks?
Cognitive impairment like memory problems can also occur, adding to the severity of excessive drinking. These signs of alcoholism and alcohol abuse will be more apparent if a woman continues to drink despite the negative consequences in her personal and social life. Despite generally consistent results across data sources, however, there isconsiderable room to improve the rigor of existing research. Specific tests ofgender convergence and divergence in drinking patterns are rare in the literature,and adulthood is often considered as a broad category (e.g. grouping adults as“18+”), even though trends vary considerably across distinct segmentsof adulthood (e.g., young adults, middle adults, older adults). Indeed, only when weseparate “adulthood” into these distinct, more refined age groups canwe synthetize the literature together in terms of the driving force underneath allof the historical patterns currently being observed, which is that age trajectoriesof drinking vary by birth cohort.
Thus, alcohol screening, brief intervention and referral for specialty treatment as needed is critical across health care settings, including primary care and mental health services, particularly for women. Risks vs. Benefits Women who drink heavily (five or more drinks on the same occasion on five or more days per month) are more likely than men to develop liver disease (including hepatitis and cirrhosis) and to suffer from alcohol-induced brain damage. And when compared to women who either don’t drink or drink in moderation, women who drink heavily are also at increased risk of developing breast cancer, osteoporosis, heart disease and reproductive issues, including infertility.
Calls to any general helpline will be received by The Healing Place, a paid advertiser. Their representatives will discuss whether their facility may be an option for you. These calls are offered at no cost to you and with no obligation to enter into treatment.
Further, more women than men with AUD have a co-occurring mood disorder, and there is an elevated suicide risk among women with AUD.6 However, research on integrated AUD and mood disorder treatments for women is limited. A study of men and women with depressive symptoms and hazardous drinking compared the effects of integrated alcohol-depression treatment, alcohol-only treatment, and depression-only treatment.82 The integrated treatment generally produced the best alcohol and depression outcomes for both women and men. In the nonintegrated treatments, women’s drinking and depressive symptoms improved more in the depression-only treatment, whereas men improved more in the alcohol-only treatment.
It has also been found that women who drink excessively develop more medical problems than men 28. This is consistent with women in developed countries having a generally higher burden of chronic disease morbidity – but not mortality – alcoholism than men 29. Alcohol-related and alcohol-specific mortality among women have been relatively stable over this time period; with 28.7 alcohol-related deaths and 7.0 alcohol specific deaths per 100,000 women in 2018 21. Women make up 39% of alcohol-related hospital admissions in England, despite being more likely to be non-drinkers and also drinking less on average compared with men 19.
- Each year in the U.S. alone, about 40,000 babies—or one in every 100—are born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (a term that encompasses fetal alcohol syndrome and several related disorders).
- Dr. Schneekloth conducts research in the field of addiction psychiatry, particularly alcoholism research and transplant psychiatry.
- Not only are women less able to tolerate the effects of alcohol than men, they are also less likely to seek specific help to overcome any drinking problems they develop.
- However, there are also individual differences that affect the amount a woman can safely drink, including weight and health, genetics and family history, and age.
Investment in underage drinkingprevention and public health messaging, restrictions on alcohol advertising toyouth, and other public health measures are likely a major contributor to thehistorical decline (Group, 2010; Wagenaar and Toomey, 2002). However, thesuccess has not been as apparent among adolescent girls, among whom drinking hasdeclined but not to the extent of boys. The goal of understanding moderators and mechanisms of change in treatment is to identify how patient characteristics interact with treatments, identify variables key to successful change, and then develop or modify treatments to target those variables more efficiently in treatment. Currently, there are relatively limited data on moderators and mechanisms of change in alcohol use during and after AUD treatment for women. Moderators are defined as “specification variables” that impact the association between two other variables,87 for instance, the effect of baseline major depressive disorder on treatment outcome of female-specific versus gender-neutral treatment for AUD. A mediator is an “intervening variable” that “transmits the effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable”;87 for instance, cognitive behavioral treatment of AUD has its effect on drinking outcome in part by increased use of effective coping skills among clients.
