Borders of problem alcohol use from the point of view of practically healthy respondents and the epidemiological meaning of these borders

Abstract

The primary goal of the work is to determine the borders of problematic alcohol use from the point of view of apparently healthy respondents, and the secondary goal is to determine the epidemiological meaning of these borders. In four regions of Ukraine (Kharkiv, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions, as well as the city of Kyiv), 1742 people were examined during 2018—2021, who belonged to four comparison groups: pa- tients with alcohol dependence (AD) (393 people); healthy relatives of AD patients (274 people); representatives of the general population comparable with the representatives of the first two age groups (334 people) and students of 3, 4 courses of medical universities (741 people). The main research instruments were the questionnaire of the international research consortium GENAHTO (Gender, Alcohol, and Harms to Others), as well as the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) and the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT). The obtained data were processed by methods of mathematical statistics (variance and correlation analysis) on a computer using Excel 2016 computational tables (with the Data Analysis package). It has been established that, from the point of view of the surveyed respondents, the border between practically healthy persons and drinkers is a dose of 3 000 grams of absolute alcohol per year, and the border between drinkers and patients with AD is 15 000 grams of absolute alcohol per year. It was shown that in the group of examined healthy respondents there were 19.04 % of persons with alcohol problems of varying severity, including 16.06 % of drinkers (persons with risky or dangerous levels of alcohol consumption) and 2.98 % of patients with AD. Extrapolation of the proportion of people with alcohol problems of varying severity (19.04 %) among the sur- veyed respondents to the entire pre-war population of Ukraine (about 42 million people) allows us to state that the total number of such people in our country is about eight million people.