New Study Looks At Alcohol Use Disorder And Adults With Commercial Insurance

A new study published in the Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports looked at alcohol use disorder diagnoses among commercially insured US adults from 2016 to 2023, by disability status and sex.

“Recent self-reported data suggests that among adults who use alcohol, disabled adults are more likely to engage in risky drinking behaviors such as binge drinking and are more likely to meet criteria for alcohol use disorder (AUD), compared to non-disabled adults,” study author Rachel Sayko Adams told us. “We wanted to understand if these patterns persist when examining potential differences in diagnosis of AUD during medical visits among adults with commercial insurance.”

Based on emerging studies which suggested that adults with disabilities are more likely to experience AUD, the research team believed that they would also have higher rates of diagnosed AUD, however, they were unsure what they would find since this has not been examined in prior research.

This study is part of a larger research study that the study team is conducting funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health to investigate how the disability community is impacted by alcohol-related problems and to examine access and quality of AUD treatment for adults with disabilities. 

“In this study, we looked at annual rates of diagnosed AUD among adults with commercial insurance between 2016 and 2023 and examined if there were differences in rates of AUD by disability status and type, and when considering the interaction of disability and sex,” Adams told us. “Between 2016-2023, adults with disabilities had greater than three times the risk of being diagnosed with AUD compared to adults without disabilities. And of additional concern, diagnosed AUD increased by over 50% during the study period with no sign of levelling off.”

The researchers also found that adults with specific disability types, such as serious mental illness and acquired brain injuries, had particularly high rates of diagnosed AUD. When examining sex-specific findings, they found that both men and women with disabilities had higher rates of diagnosed AUD than men and women without disabilities.

“While prior research suggested that disabled people may have a higher likelihood of developing AUD, we were surprised by the magnitude of the findings demonstrating that disabled adults had more than three times the rate of AUD than non-disabled adults,” Adams told us. “We were also particularly concerned to see that disabled women had higher rates of AUD than non-disabled women and non-disabled men, since traditionally men have higher rates of AUD than women.”

Adams believes these results demonstrate that people with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to alcohol-related problems and AUD and that it is essential that providers talk to their disabled patients about their alcohol use and to screen for AUD to prevent downstream alcohol-related morbidity and mortality. 

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