HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, Oct. 24, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Women have made major strides towards equality with men, but new research shows there’s one way in which they are catching up that could be harmful: drinking.
Women are now nearly on par with men in alcohol consumption, and the ill effects drinking has on health, a worldwide review finds.
Historically, men have been far more likely than women to drink alcohol, and to drink so much it affects their health. Older studies suggested as much as a 12-fold difference between the sexes, the researchers said.
Recent data suggests that the gap has closed. Women across the globe are now nearly as likely as men to drink and to engage in excessive, harmful drinking, said lead researcher Tim Slade. He’s an epidemiologist with the National Drug and Alcohol Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
“We can no longer think of alcohol use and alcohol-related harms as problems that just affect men,” Slade said.
To track trends in drinking between the genders, Slade and his colleagues pooled data from more than 4 million people who were part of 68 international studies. These studies were published between 1980 and 2014. The studies included data collected between 1948 and 2014, representing people born as far back as 1891.
The researchers focused on three categories: any alcohol use, excessive use, and health and social problems related to drinking.
Men born between 1891 and 1910 were twice as likely as their female counterparts to drink alcohol. People born between 1991 and 2000 were about equally likely to drink, the researchers found.
At the same times, the gender gap for excessive drinking fell from 3 times higher for men to 1.2 times. The gender gap for harms associated with drinking fell from 3.6 times higher for men to 1.3 times, the researchers reported.
After accounting for potential bias, the researchers concluded that the gender gap for drinking fell by 3.2 percent with each successive five-year generation, but was steepest among those born from 1966 onward.
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