Department of Criminal Justice professor William Alex Pridemore and Department of Geography professor Tony Grubesic used crime statistics and alcohol outlet licensing data from Cincinnati, Ohio, to examine the spatial relationship between alcohol outlet density and assault density.

According to research findings, off-premise outlets appear to be responsible for about one in four simple assaults and one in three aggravated assaults

"A higher density of alcohol sales outlets in an area means closer proximity and easier availability to an intoxicating substance for residents," Pridemore said, in Science Daily.

"Perhaps just as importantly, alcohol outlets provide a greater number of potentially deviant places. Convenience stores licensed to sell alcohol may be especially troublesome in this regard, as they often serve not only as sources of alcohol but also as local gathering places with little formal social control."

Through the use of spatial regression models, the researchers determined that adding one off-premise alcohol sales site per square mile would create 2.3 more simple assaults and 0.6 more aggravated assaults per square mile. Violence associated with restaurants and bars was found to drive up violence as adding one restaurant would result in 1.15 more simple assaults and adding one bar would result in 1.35 more simple assaults.

"We believe that alcohol outlets, as a source of community-level variation in levels of interpersonal violence, deserve greater attention in the criminological literature," Pridemore said. "The nature of our findings should encourage further investigation of the nature of the ecological association between alcohol, violence and other negative outcomes within communities."
 

This has not always been the case. Alcohol use and alcoholism was for many generations considered to be a man’s issue, but this appears to have changed significantly over the past 50 years or so. Since World War II there have been many shifts in the drinking habits and alcoholism rates of women. Several factors seem related to this increase in alcohol use and health-related problems for women. Some of these are:

• more social acceptance of women drinking
• more women in the workplace
• change in social roles of women
• less gender stereotyping

The biological makeup of women has been well documented as increasing their susceptibility to alcoholism and to other alcohol-related health issues. This causes several differences in the effects of alcohol consumption between men and women. For example, one drink of alcohol reacts in a woman’s body closer to the way in which two drinks would affect a man. This leads to quicker intoxication, faster development of alcohol dependence and a faster development of alcohol-related health problems such as cirrhosis, hypertension and alcohol-related brain damage.

Women’s bodies contain less water and more fatty tissue than do the bodies of men. Women also have been found to have less dehydrogenase in their bodies. Dehydrogenase is an enzyme necessary for the breakdown of alcohol. They are typically smaller and have less body weight than men which causes women who drink the same amount of alcohol as men to process it slower, feel its effects longer and to become more intoxicated. All of these factors cause women to become intoxicated quicker and stay intoxicated longer than men thus creating the ideal biological environment for alcohol-related complications.

The health risks of alcohol for women occur even in binge drinking and other patterns of alcohol abuse not just in alcohol dependence and, again, are significantly different than for men. For example, women have a greater risk of developing alcohol-related liver and pancreatic conditions in a shorter amount of time than do men. These conditions are also more likely to be of greater severity in women. In fact, statistically, more alcoholic women die from cirrhosis than do alcoholic men. Other serious health issues that appear to increase for women who drink are incidents of ulcers, osteoporosis, heart disease and reproductive problems. Additionally, women with late stage chronic alcoholism tend to develop alcohol-related health complications such as malnutrition and anemia more quickly than their male counterparts who are also in the same stage of illness.

An additional factor for women is that they tend to drink with their male companions or spouses at a similar rate and volume of intake. This is a social dynamic that also contributes to accelerated effects of alcohol use in women compared to men. It appears that the man in a relationship will very frequently set the pattern of alcohol use for the couple. This may be because a couple who drinks together to achieve intoxication will have to accommodate the male’s slower intoxication rate. A woman who drinks with a male companion regularly will then be susceptible to consuming more alcohol than if she were drinking to intoxication by herself.
 

The NHS reports that roughly 9,072 people suffering from the disease were treated in the hospital and the disease caused 1,059 deaths. The mortality rate among 30 to 39-year olds linked with chronic liver disease has increased five times in 25 years.

Other European nations have reported a fall in the rate of the disease. Scotland continues to report more such cases and comes next to Hungary in the number of diagnosed individuals. Nicola Sturgeon, Health Secretary, has said the statistics identify the need to take strict actions on alcohol misuse and there should be a minimum price for drink.

“Most worrying is the increase in alcohol-related problems among young people, who are putting themselves at risk of serious health problems. Alcohol is now around 70 per cent more affordable than it was in 1980 and, over the same period, consumption and alcohol-related harm have spiraled,” Sturgeon said.

“These factors are not unrelated. Cheap alcohol is making a serious situation even worse. By linking price to product strength, minimum pricing will put an end to the sale of high-strength alcohol for less than the cost of bottled water.”

At this present time, the Alcohol Misuse Bill is making its way to the Scottish Parliament, which is meant to introduce a minimum price per unit of alcohol.

"Alcohol dependence (AD) is a very complex disorder," said Geoff Joslyn, senior scientist at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center and corresponding author for the study. "We know that inherited genes account for about half of a person’s risk of becoming AD but this genetic risk is spread across many genes. To simplify the genetic risk, we took advantage of clinical and epidemiological studies that have shown that a person’s innate response to alcohol is related to their risk of becoming AD. Individuals that have a low response to alcohol, that is people who must drink more than the average person to become drunk, are at a greater risk of becoming AD. We studied this alcohol response because we think it is a sub-component of AD and is much less genetically complex."

"With complex diseases such as alcoholism, diabetes or cancer, which are caused by many genes working together, there has been a great deal of difficulty identifying "a gene" that represents a good target for developing new medical therapies," said Michael F. Miles, a professor in the departments of pharmacology/toxicology and neurology at Virginia Commonwealth University. "The approach described in this manuscript sidesteps the entire issue of the "gene" and focuses on the functional unit of genes, or biological pathways. So, to paraphrase a mantra from another field, "it’s the network, stupid." By focusing on networks rather than single genes, genetic studies such as genome-wide association studies can have increased power for detecting biological factors affecting complex diseases."

Miles added that, while gene networks have been widely used to analyze data related to different diseases, this study combined several different approaches to improve the yield of significant gene networks associated with AD.

Joslyn and his colleagues analyzed data on subjects selected from a larger, long-term study called the San Diego Sibling Pair investigation: 367 (233 females, 134 males) Caucasian participants 18-25 years old with a positive family history of AD, from 186 independent families. All subjects were tested for their LR to alcohol, and Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) was performed to determine if a gene set—genes that participate in a common biological function—demonstrate a greater genetic association than would be randomly found.

"We characterized 367 people whose LR to alcohol had been measured in the laboratory," said Joslyn. "We were looking for variation in genes that correlated with variation in alcohol response. No single gene was correlated well enough with alcohol response to be confident that the observation was not just due to statistical fluctuation.

The results suggest that variation in sets of genes that encode the components that enable neuronal communication contribute to individual differences in alcohol LR. The neuronal signaling pathways identified were the same pathways that had been implicated in alcohol response in experimental animal and tissue culture models. Glutamate neurotransmitter signaling systems were most strongly implicated."

"Identifying neuronal signaling genes, including glutamate receptor signaling, in a genetic study of human variation in responses to alcohol is hugely important because it reinforces the years of work that has pointed to single genes in such systems," said Miles. "However, the GSEA largely focuses on previously defined ontology gene sets or known biological pathways. Alternative approaches, such as using novel gene-gene correlation structures derived from protein-protein interaction or microarray expression correlation datasets, might illuminate results from the genome-wide association studies analysis that fall far away from "under the streetlight." Despite this, the recapitulation of glutamate signaling … will more than likely further encourage the search for pharmacological agents targeting glutamate signaling as therapies in alcoholism or alcohol toxicity."

"The results of this study do not suggest any new mechanisms," noted Joslyn, "but rather add corroborative evidence to established ideas. The study does suggest that natural, inherited variability in glutamate signaling may contribute to variability in alcohol response. We thus hypothesize that it is possible to alter alcohol response through therapies that target altering glutamate signaling. It will take many years of further study to determine the validity of the hypothesis and if such therapies can be useful in treating AD."

Reuters reports that 51-year-old Margot Kaessmann, known as the "pop bishop," is a regular on television talk shows and had been a controversial choice as head of Germany’s EKD, the main association of Protestant churches, because she is a divorced mother of four.

Kaessmann told reporters she had made a grave mistake which she deeply regretted.
"But I cannot ignore the fact that my office and my authority … have been damaged," she said. "My heart says quite clearly that I cannot remain in office with the authority that is required," Kaessmann said.

With immediate effect, she would give up her role as leader of the EKD, an umbrella group of 22 Lutheran, Reformed and United Churches, and as Lutheran bishop of Hanover, she said.

State prosecutors in the northern city of Hanover said on Monday that Kaessmann was under investigation and could lose her driver’s license for a year after police stopped her for running a red light on Saturday night.

She was found to have a blood-alcohol level that was more than three times the legal limit, the prosecutors said.

Widely seen as someone whom ordinary people can relate to, Kaessmann has worked to revive the church in Germany, which has been losing members.

But she drew criticism from many politicians last month for denouncing Germany’s military mission in Afghanistan in a New Year’s sermon in Berlin.

As one of the few religious leaders in a NATO country to raise the issue, she said she could not justify the German mission in Afghanistan from a Christian point of view.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, daughter of a Protestant pastor, said she acknowledged Kaessmann’s resignation with respect and regret.

"I have very much valued the cooperation with Bishop Kaessmann," said Merkel in a statement.

Germany has roughly equal numbers of Protestants and Roman Catholics. It was not immediately clear who would replace Kaessmann.

Physical conditions include obesity and cardiovascular disease, while psychological conditions include post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse.

A recent study examined the impact of adverse childhood events (ACEs) on the risk for adult substance dependence (SD). Douglas, et al. analyzed the association between such factors as increasing childhood trauma, the presence of substance abuse in the childhood household, and lower stability in the childhood home with a prediction of SD.

The researchers also predicted that multiple childhood traumas would cumulatively increase the risk of SD. Because mood and anxiety disorders are commonly found in conjunction with SD, the study also sought to determine whether these types of disorders might assist with intervention for those at risk for SD.

The study recruited 2,510 subjects from four major university hospitals that had pooled data from family-based and case-control genetic studies of SD. The participants were evaluated using the SSADDA, which provides demographic information and assesses substance dependence using the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria.

The results of the study supported the hypothesis. Those participants who had experienced sexual or physical abuse were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with SD. In addition, household substance abuse nearly doubled the risk of SD in adulthood.

Because of the genetic aspect of substance abuse, the connection between substance abuse in the household and SD diagnosis in adulthood may be explained by other factors.

As the researchers hypothesized, the participants with SD were also found to have had a much lower level of household stability, reporting a significantly greater number of relocations, multiple main caregivers, and a lower perceived quality of relationship with the main caregiver during childhood than their control group counterparts.

The researchers also found there to be a cumulative effect of childhood traumas on the risk for SD. For each additional instance of a type of childhood trauma, the odds of developing an adulthood dependence on alcohol, cocaine or opioids were nearly doubled.

The study also established a clear link between the onset of mood and anxiety disorders preceding the onset of SD and that a measure of lifetime mood and anxiety disorders mediated the effects of two ACEs on subsequent SD.

The results of the study are helpful in examining strategies for education and intervention for those already predisposed to SD because of identified childhood trauma and abuse. This study increases the understanding of how ACEs impact children far into adulthood.

A rally will be held at 11:30 a.m. at the Capitol Rotunda in Frankfort in support of House Bill 58, which requires first-time drunk drivers to use an ignition interlock device.

“Convicted drunk driving offenders need to blow into an interlock device before they drive,” said Dean-Mooney. “We know that interlocks stop the offender from driving their vehicle while drunk and prevent future offenses.”

Last week the Appropriations and Revenue Committee of the House of Representatives voted in favor of H.B. 58, clearing the way for a vote on the House floor possibly later this week. The bill is sponsored by Representative Dennis Keene (D-Campbell County) along with 52 co-sponsors. Twelve states already require interlock devices; Kentucky would become the 13th state.

“I welcome the President of MADD to Kentucky to speak out on behalf of drunk-driving victims and their families,” said Rep. Dennis Keene. “It is time to implement legislation that we know will save lives. We have it our power to reduce the number of people from getting behind the wheel of a car while intoxicated which will save families from the suffering that goes along with these tragic circumstances.”

Both Representative Keene and Laura Dean-Mooney have experienced tragedy at the hands of drunk drivers. Representative Dennis Keene nearly lost his daughter in a drunk-driving accident in 2002. She required three subsequent surgeries in order to overcome her injuries. Dean-Mooney’s husband was killed in 1991 by a drunk driver who was driving the wrong way on the highway and was intoxicated with a blood alcohol level of .34.

Under the legislation, an ignition interlock device shall be imposed on the first offense of driving under the influence. In 2008, nearly 200 people lost their lives in Kentucky due to drunk drivers. More than 34,000 people were arrested in 2008 for drunk driving in Kentucky.

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, more than 500 of Ohio’s worst repeat DUI offenders have moved to border states to avoid the tougher drunk driving laws in Ohio, and 254 of those repeat offenders have moved to Kentucky.

New Mexico passed similar legislation that has led to a 35% drop in drunk-driving deaths since its passage. According to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, 13,000 people lost their lives in drunk driving accidents in 2007.

“This legislation is a public protection act that will help make our roads safer while saving many lives. I am very proud to champion this legislation and look forward to the governor signing House Bill 58 into law,” said Rep. Keene.

The University of Florida researchers surveyed more than 800 bar patrons at random between the hours of 10 p.m. and 3 a.m., and also collected breath samples to test blood-alcohol content (BAC). The average BAC for alcoholic energy drink consumers was 0.109 percent, well above the legal standard for intoxication.

Patrons who consumed alcohol mixed with highly caffeinated energy drinks like Red Bull were also more likely to have consumed alcohol for longer periods of time, and left bars later than other drinkers.

The study was led by Dennis Thombs of the school’s College of Public Health and Health Professions. "His approach is unique because it was conducted in a natural drinking environment—college bars," said Wake University’s Mary Claire O’Brien, author of previous research on alcoholic energy drinks.

"His results clearly support the serious concern raised by previous research, that subjective drunkenness may be reduced by the concurrent ingestion of caffeinated energy drinks, increasing both the likelihood of further alcohol consumption, and of driving when intoxicated."

The study was published in the journal Addictive Behaviors.

Joseph Jacobson is a professor at Wayne State University School of Medicine and the corresponding author of a study that found while children with FASD may meet the behavioral criteria for ADHD, the attention difficulties in these individuals differ in subtle yet important respects.

"ADHD is clinically diagnosed primarily on the basis of observations by the parent, teacher, and clinician regarding the degree to which a child exhibits specific behavioral symptoms, such as difficulty sustaining attention to and completing tasks or play activities, failure to listen when spoken to directly, impulsivity, talking out of turn, or difficulty sitting still," explained Jacobson.

"A large proportion of children with a history of prenatal alcohol exposure exhibits these behavioral characteristics and, therefore, may meet the criteria for a diagnosis of ADHD."

Participants in Jacobson’s research who had been diagnosed with ADHD, regardless of their prenatal alcohol exposure, were less accurate at inhibiting responses. The ADHD group without prenatal alcohol exposure showed a unique ERP brain wave pattern. This reality could reflect a more effortful strategy related to inhibitory control.

"The data support the notion that information processing difficulties in children with prenatal alcohol exposure who exhibit ADHD symptoms may differ from those seen in children with idiopathic ADHD, even though behaviorally both groups may exhibit inattention and hyperactivity," said Jacobson.

"The ERP data suggest that different neurophysiological processes may be responsible for the attention problems seen in these two groups, which may explain why psychostimulant medication, which is often effective in treating idiopathic ADHD, is reported to be less effective in children with ADHD behavioral symptoms who were prenatally exposed to alcohol."
 

"These numbers are high," says Dr. Jurgen Rehm, one of the authors of the study published in this week’s edition of the Lancet. "And they’re only getting higher as more people drink in higher volumes and more frequent patterns."

Amy Minsky of Canwest News Service writes that the researchers attribute the recent global increase in part to greater consumption by women.

"Plus, production is more widespread and marketing has globalized," Rehm said, adding that the effect of alcohol on the human body is better understood and can be more easily linked to causes of death.

"The public doesn’t always recognize an alcohol-related death," he added. "It’s not like if your neighbor dies of lung cancer, and you assume he was a smoker. Nobody ever assumes that their neighbor’s breast cancer was because she was a drinker."

Most diseases that are commonly associated with alcoholism—such as cirrhosis of the liver—constitute a minority of alcohol-related deaths, said Rehm.

Alcohol can influence several hormonal systems in the body, causing various diseases such as mouth and throat, colorectal and breast cancers, as well as strokes.

A woman who has three drinks per day on average increases her risk of getting breast cancer by about 15 percent, said Rehm. "That means that (perhaps) only one in 20 cases of breast cancer is due to alcohol consumption. And that’s why the public ignores alcohol as a carcinogen."

The report noted alcohol consumption also leads to accidental, premature deaths.
"When you have more people drinking more alcohol, you get more people who are risk-prone," said Rehm. "You have more people on our highways, drunk driving, and more people drunk while snowmobiling or boating. Accidents and deaths will happen."

Separate data from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health published in 2006 found 3,892 deaths attributable to alcohol in Canada, or 1.8 percent of all Canadian deaths. The three biggest contributing factors were unintentional injuries, cancers and digestive diseases.

While the Canadian figure is lower than the world percentage, the global numbers are bolstered by areas such as Europe, where one in 10 deaths is directly attributable to alcohol, and Russia, where about one in seven deaths can be directly linked to alcohol.
The study found that globally, alcohol consumption worked out to about 12 units per person per week on average. A unit is comparable to a small can of beer, glass of wine or a one-ounce shot of liquor.

"But globally, the vast majority of adults abstain from liquor," said Rehm. "So the drinkers are actually drinking about twice as much."

The Canadian consumption is calculated at almost nine units per person per week. By contrast, in Europe it is 21.5 units per week.

"The public disregards a lot of what alcohol does to the system," said Rehm.