A recent study found acute alcohol consumption is more likely to cause injury to women than men.
The risk of injury for men and women was the same for men and women who had consumed three drinks (each containing about 16 milliliters of pure ethanol), but risk became twice as high for women than men after 15 drinks and three times as high after 30 drinks, the Alcohol Research Institute reported. In the study the drinks included in the data were consumed at least six hours before injury.
"Even small amounts of drinking put one at risk for injury," lead researcher Cheryl Cherpitel of the Alcohol Research Group in Emeryville, California told Reuters.
After three drinks the increased risk of injury to both women and men was about 4.5 times higher, but these numbers rose much more quickly in women as alcohol consumption continued.
To make their findings the researchers looked at over 13,000 injured patients from "Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Guyana, India, Ireland, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Sweden, and Switzerland."
The researchers found this type of injuries are more prevalent in countries where alcohol consumption is not consumed regularly (such as with meals) so people are more likely to binge-drink.
"People in the different countries can actually consume the same amount of alcohol but the pattern of drinking really makes a big difference," Cherpitel told Reuters.
The researchers believe men's lower risk of injury is linked to their higher tolerance for alcohol. Women were probably more likely to sustain violence-related injuries than men, but the study did not look at this factor.
The findings highlight the need for physicians to examine intoxicated patients for injuries.
"Maintaining that high index of suspicion is the safest way we have to assure we're not missing significant injuries in people who are intoxicated," Maria Raven, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco told Reuters. "All of us have found severe injury when we didn't suspect we would."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Addiction.
