Alcoholism—or alcohol abuse and dependence, as it's technically called—gets talked about a lot, but not always with as many hard facts as one might hope. So some researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism sat down with a gigantic pile of data to find out how widespread alcoholism is, who's abusing alcohol—and how this has changed over the past 10 years.

What the researchers wanted to know: What are recent trends in alcoholism? Is alcohol abuse and dependence going up, down, or what?

What they did: The researchers used data from two surveys on alcohol abuse and dependence. Each survey was conducted via face-to-face interviews with about 43,000 people, who were chosen randomly for each study. The interviews included a section to diagnose alcohol abuse and dependence. The studies were sponsored by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

What they found: In 1991–1992, 7.4 percent of Americans abused or were dependent on alcohol; by 2001–2002, this rose to 8.5 percent. Alcohol dependence, which means that you're so dependent on alcohol that you get withdrawal symptoms if you don't have it, declined among males while staying about the same among females. But alcohol abuse, which indicates only that you misuse alcohol (but aren't necessarily dependent), went up significantly, from 3 percent of Americans in 1991–1992 to 4.6 percent in 2001–2002. The increase was especially large among young blacks and Hispanics. Men, American Indians, and whites were particularly at risk of abuse in 2001–2002. So were young adults, particularly whites and American Indians.

What the study means to you: It's useful to have some long-term data about alcoholism—and the knowledge about who's at the highest risk could help design programs to help prevent alcoholism.

Caveats: The racial categories used in the surveys are broad; for example, the authors point out, one study found vast differences in drinking problems among Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Cambodian-Americans, Korean-Americans, and Filipino-Americans, all of whom would be "Asians" in this study.

Find out more: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/

Read the article: "The 12-Month Prevalence and Trends in DSM-IV Alcohol Abuse and Dependence: United States, 1991–1991 and 2001–2002." Drug and Alcohol Dependence. June 11, 2004, Vol. 74, pp. 223–234.

Free abstract from the National Library of Medicine: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15194200