Text Messages From Emergency Department Reduce Binge Drinking rate by 50 Percent

Young adults screened positive for binge drinking reduced their hazardous behavior by over 50 percent after receiving texts from ER.

Intake of five or more drinks per day for men and four or more drinks per day for women is defined as hazardous drinking.  A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that excess of alcohol consumption, including binge drinking, caused 10 percent of the deaths among the working-age adults in the United States.

While evaluating 765 young adult emergency patients with a history of hazardous drinking, the researchers found that their binge drinking reduced by more than 50 percent after receiving mobile phone text messages following a visit to the emergency department (ER)

"Each day in the U.S., more than 50,000 adults ages 18 to 24 visit ERs and up to half have hazardous alcohol use patterns," said Brian Suffoletto, MD, of the University Of Pittsburgh School Of Medicine in Pittsburgh, Pa.  "More than a third of them report alcohol abuse or dependence.  The emergency department provides a unique setting to screen young adults for drinking problems and to engage with them via their preferred mode of communication to reduce future use."

Among the 765, one-third of them received text messages for 12 weeks prompting them to respond to drinking-related plan or goal to boost reflection on either drinking plan or their decision.  One-third of them got only text message queries about their drinking and one-third received no text messages.

The adults who got both text message queries and feedback lowered their self-reported binge drinking days by almost 51 percent and also decreased the number of self-reported drinks per day by 31 percent. The group of adults who received just text messages or no text messages reported increased binge drinking episodes.

"Illicit drugs and opiates grab all the headlines, but alcohol remains the fourth leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.," said Dr. Suffoletto.  "If we can intervene in a meaningful way in the health and habits of people when they are young, we could make a real dent in that tragic statistic.  Alcohol may bring them to the ER, but we can do our part to keep them from becoming repeat visitors."

The study was documented in Annals of Emergency Medicine.