Americans’ increased pandemic drinking lasted for years, study finds

▶ Watch Video: Pandemic-era drinking increases persist, study shows

The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with increases in stress-related drinking and alcohol-related deaths, and new research suggests drinking didn’t stop as things returned to normal.

In the study, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers found drinking increases from 2018 to 2020 persisted into 2022.

The population-based study used data from adults 18 years and older who participated in the National Health Interview Survey from 2018 to 2022. The survey, which used complex sampling, was nationally representative and had more than 20,000 respondents each year.

“Potential causes of this sustained increase include normalization of and adaptation to increased drinking due to stress from the pandemic and disrupted access to medical services,” the authors wrote.

Turning to alcohol to relieve anxiety and depression is misguided, however, CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook explained on “CBS Mornings” Tuesday.

“For anxiety, temporarily, alcohol can relieve the anxiety, but long term, it’s going to increase potentially anxiety,” he said. “And depression — Alcohol is a depressant. It actually depresses you. So that’s not the cure to self-medicate that way.”

Plus, in addition to emotional negatives, there are many physical health drawbacks too.

“The liver, the heart, the pancreas, the brain — it could absolutely affect all these different organs,” LaPook said.

Regardless of cause, the findings highlight an “alarming public health issue,” the authors note, as alcohol is a leading cause of illness and death in the United States.

Dr. Divya Ayyala, with Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, told CBS News more patients are coming in with alcohol-related health problems like severe liver disease.

“Originally, the increase in drinking was due to social isolation, disruption and daily activity and general lack of accessibility to healthcare and mental healthcare during a really stressful time,” Ayyala said. “However, we’re seeing that these trends are sustained, meaning that either people don’t know where to get help (or) they don’t know that they need help.”

LaPook said an increase in women drinking, as shown in the study, is also “of concern,” but adds nobody knows exactly what is driving this.

“There’s more marketing to women, right? You’ve seen that in recent years. It’s become more socially acceptable for women to drink. And then, what nobody really knows is, during the pandemic, was there more stress on women because they had to do maybe a little bit more in the household?” he said.

What is considered heavy drinking?

The study defines heavy drinking as four or more drinks a day for women at any one setting or eight of more in a week. For men, it’s five or more drinks in a day or 15 or more in a week.

“It’s not an abrupt cutoff, but that’s the general idea,” LaPook said.

As for what constitutes a drink, it’s about 14 grams of pure alcohol, which equates to about 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits.