| Intoxicated ER Patients Likely to Be Alcoholic | |
Washington, D.C. - Doctors should not assume that patients admitted to emergency
rooms with high blood alcohol levels are moderate drinkers, according to a study
published in the January 2001 American Journal of Psychiatry.
The study discusses the difficulty of determining whether a patient is alcoholic
or merely in a drunken state. Only nine percent of the patients admitted to the
emergency ward for acute alcohol intoxication are moderate alcohol users,
according to lead author Raymond Schwan, M.D., Ph.D., a psychiatrist at
Clermont-Ferrand University Hospital in France. Schwan says the results of the
study are comparable to findings in the United States.
The detection and early treatment of patients with alcohol problems should be a
major health care objective today, according to the study. But signs of alcohol
abuse can be elusive, which makes diagnosis - and therefore treatment - more
difficult. Currently, alcohol treatment is offered to less than five percent of
intoxicated patients in the ER.
The authors of the study observed 166 patients over two months who were admitted
for acute alcohol intoxication as a principal or additional diagnosis. The
majority of patients admitted to emergency rooms are intoxicated, according to
the study.
While identifying severe alcohol dependency in ER patients is fairly
straightforward, it is more difficult to diagnose alcohol abuse because the
signs may be less visual, Schwan says. Generally, alcohol abuse is less severe
than alcohol dependence and treatment is more effective.
Furthermore, doctors may have a hard time making diagnoses because they may not
be aware that the majority of the patients have severe difficulties with
alcohol, Schwan says. For this reason, any case of drunkenness in an emergency
room should indicate abuse or dependency, requiring appropriate treatment in the
form of psychiatric and social therapy.
["Patients Admitted to Emergency Services for Drunkenness: Moderate Alcohol
Users or Harmful Drinkers?" by Raymond Schwan, M.D., Ph.D., et al., p.96,
American Journal of Psychiatry, January 2001.]
---American Psychiatric Association
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