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Women's binge drinking fuels national boom

Whether quaffing artisanal cocktails at hipster bars or knocking back no-name beers on the couch, more Americans are drinking heavily - and engaging in episodes of binge drinking - a major study of alcohol use has concluded. And the increases are driven largely by women.

Whether quaffing artisanal cocktails at hipster bars or knocking back no-name beers on the couch, more Americans are drinking heavily - and engaging in episodes of binge drinking - a major study of alcohol use has concluded. And the increases are driven largely by women.

Heavy drinking among Americans rose 17.2 percent between 2005 and 2012, according to a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, published recently in the American Journal of Public Health.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines heavy drinking as exceeding an average of one drink per day during the preceding month for women, and two drinks per day for men. Binge drinking is defined as four or more drinks for women and five or more drinks for men on a single occasion at least once during the preceding month.

Nationwide over the course of the decade, the rate of binge drinking among women increased more than seven times the rate among men.

"It doesn't surprise me at all, and I believe the numbers of women will continue to rise," said Michelle Smith, who directs clinical operations at Seabrook House, an inpatient addiction treatment facility in Bridgeton, N.J.

"Remember that life used to be different for women. They used to be home taking care of the children, and now things have totally changed. Some of the increase is due to professional pressures. Women in the business world are doing business dinners like men used to do. It's socially acceptable now for them to have a drink or two or three, sometimes up to four."

Charles O'Brien, professor of psychiatry and founding director of the Center for Studies of Addiction at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out that fetal alcohol syndrome makes the rise in drinking among women a particularly serious problem.

"If the woman becomes pregnant and doesn't realize it, that's when the fetus is most vulnerable," he said. "Women should be alarmed."

O'Brien has seen the culture of drinking change on campus.

"I work with a lot of students," O'Brien said. "I hear from my students they think they're supposed to get drunk before they even go out on a date. It's pretty shocking."

Locally, the highest percent gain of female binge drinkers was in Montgomery County, with a 9.2 percent increase between 2002 and 2012, followed by 8.4 percent in Burlington County, 8.2 in Bucks County, and 6.9 percent in Philadelphia. In Pennsylvania as a whole, the statewide binge drinking rate among women grew by 4.5 percent, bringing the percentage of women who binge drank in 2012 to 13.3 percent, just a tenth of a point higher than New Jersey's rate. Pennsylvanians remain among the heaviest drinkers in the country, with a binge drinking rate of 20 percent among both genders, followed closely by 19 percent in New Jersey.

The study is the first to track adult drinking patterns at the county level. In 2012, 18 percent of Americans were considered binge drinkers.

About 88,600 U.S. deaths were attributed to alcohol in 2010, the researchers note, and the cost of excessive drinking has been estimated at more than $220 billion per year.

Public-health experts offer a number of cultural and economic explanations for the increase in excessive drinking.

It's now more acceptable for women to drink the way men traditionally have, said Tom Greenfield, scientific director at the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute in Oakland, Calif.

Taxes on alcohol have not risen along with the Consumer Price Index, so wine, beer, and liquor have gotten cheaper over time in real dollars, he said.

Alcohol advertising, particularly for hard liquor, has increased in recent years. A Federal Trade Commission study found companies spent about $3.45 billion to advertise alcoholic beverages in 2011.

Alcohol-control policies, such as limits on when and where alcohol can be sold and how long bars can stay open, have weakened over the decades, Greenfield said. That may partly explain rising consumption nationwide, particularly in some states where "blue laws" once prohibited alcohol sales on Sundays or in supermarkets.

To conduct the study, researchers analyzed data on about 3.7 million Americans age 21 and older from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, an ongoing telephone survey of health behaviors conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.