Drinking heavily is defined as having eight or more alcoholic drinks in a week for women, and 15 or more drinks per week for men. Binge drinking, on the other hand, is defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as consuming four drinks for women and five drinks for men in a single occasion. To be considered an alcoholic, one should be unable to stop or reduce drinking, having the need to continue drinking even if it causes problems with family or work, and excessive time spent drinking on a daily basis.
Given all these factors, a new study conducted by the CDC finds that only a small number of Americans fit the criteria to be considered "alcoholics". In fact, only 10 per cent of U.S. adults with alcohol drinking habits are actually alcoholics, according to the CDC, the federal group that analyzed self-reported data between 2009 and 2011 from 138,100 U.S. adults.
"While many people think that most, if not all, heavy drinkers are alcoholics, medical specialists have long suspected that belief is incorrect," said one of the authors Robert Brewer.
Only a third of those who admitted binge drinking 10 or more times in the previous month were alcoholics, the study found.
The study also revealed that binge drinking was most common among people with annual family incomes of more than $75,000, while alcohol dependence was most common among people with incomes less than $25,000, the report said.
"Although alcohol dependence is an important public health problem, these findings suggest that most excessive drinkers are unlikely to need addiction treatment," the researchers wrote in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Preventing Chronic Disease.
"Anybody who takes from this paper that excessive drinking is not dangerous unless you are dependent is simply not getting the message, which is that drinking too much is bad, period," Brewer said.
"That said, it is important to quantify the percentage of alcoholics among heavy drinkers in order to develop effective strategies for reducing alcohol consumption," Brewer added. "For example, alcoholics may require treatment to stop drinking, while non-alcoholics might cut back if alcohol taxes were raised or the number of stores allowed to sell alcohol is reduced."
"The great preponderance of people who are drinking too much are not candidates for specialized treatment but they can be helped in other ways," Brewer explained.
Drinking too much alcohol is responsible for 88,000 deaths yearly in the U.S., costing $223.5 billion in 2006, the report said. Health effects include breast cancer, liver and heart disease and auto accidents.
