'Casual' smokers have a greater risk of hazardous drinking and alcohol-use disorders

* Smokers are more likely to drink and drink heavily, and heavy smokers also tend to be heavy drinkers.
* New findings indicate that non-daily or "casual" smoking among young adults confers a greater risk of hazardous drinking and alcohol-use disorders (AUDs).
* Casual smokers were 16 times more likely than non-smokers to be hazardous drinkers, and five times more likely to meet criteria for an AUD.

Non-daily or "casual" smokers tend to slip through the cracks of prevention efforts. Yet casual smoking and heavy drinking are prevalent behaviors among young adults and, furthermore, casual smoking occurs primarily in the context of alcohol use. A new study of casual smoking and drinking behavior has found that non-daily smoking confers an increased risk of hazardous drinking and alcohol-use disorders (AUDs).

Results will be published in the December issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"Our goal in this study was to look at a range of smoking behaviors – daily smoking, nondaily smoking, nonsmoking – and associations with binge drinking, hazardous drinking, and AUDs," said Sherry A. McKee, associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. "The National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) provided us with a unique opportunity to investigate these relationships in young adults aged 18 to 25 years. We were able to examine whether associations between non-daily smoking and alcohol use were specific to just college students, or generalized to young adults who were not college students."

"Non-daily smokers are a fast-growing subpopulation of smokers, now constituting at least 25 percent of all adult smokers in the US," added Saul Shiffman, a professor in the departments of psychology and pharmaceutical science at the University of Pittsburgh. "Furthermore, this study is important because it sheds light on particular groups defined by age and patterns of smoking and drinking. This can advance our understanding of the range of drinking patterns, and also the developmental trajectory of problem drinking."

Using NESARC data, researchers queried 5,838 young adults on their current smoking behavior (during the preceding 12 months) as well as weekly consumption of alcohol, frequency of alcohol use, frequency of binge-drinking behavior, rates of hazardous drinking, and rates of DSM-IV alcohol diagnoses as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition.

Compared to non-smokers, casual smokers were 16 times more likely to be hazardous drinkers, and five times more likely to meet criteria for an AUD.

"We anticipated that the associations between alcohol use and smoking would be greatest in non-daily smokers, but were surprised by the degree of the associations," said McKee. "While casual smoking was more common in college students, the relationships between smoking and drinking behavior were the same for young adults whether they were students or not."