Preventing the Consequences of Alcohol Abuse: Identification of Soldiers at High Risk for Fatal and Serious Injuries
Abstract
This report outlines progress made during the third year of the "Preventing the consequences of alcohol abuse: Identification of soldiers at high risk for fatal and serious injuries" research project. The main goal of this study is to improve understanding of the relationship between alcohol problems and risk of serious injury. Specifically, the study seeks to document the prevalence of injury-related diagnoses among soldiers admitted to the hospital with and without alcohol-related co-morbidities, and to ascertain the relationship between alcohol-related diagnoses and risk for subsequent re-injury or other adverse injury outcomes (e.g., death, disability). This project relies on the use of secondary health and administrative data. Addressing challenges related to incomplete, missing, and miscoded data has been a major priority for the project. Changes in the management of healthcare throughout the 199Os and concurrent change to TRICARE have affected healthcare use patterns as well as data archiving and accessibility. Researchers must use caution when using and interpreting data maintained in administrative military hospital databases. Preliminary findings indicate that rates for Army alcohol-related hospitalizations were higher than civilian rates through most of the 1980s; this trend began to reverse in the early 199Os. Such trends seem to correlate with changes in military and civilian alcohol policies throughout the 198Os and early 199Os. Over this same time period, soldiers referred for evaluation of potential alcohol-related problems to the Army's substance abuse program were significantly more likely be white, male, young (18-25), of lower rank (E1-E4), and less well-educated than the military population as a whole. Future work will continue to examine the epidemiology of both alcohol- and injury-related conditions using both hospitalization and substance abuse treatment databases.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 01, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA447629
Entities
People
- Nicole S. Bell