The Government has published its response to the House of Commons Health Select Committee inquiry on the Government’s Alcohol Strategy. The Committee gave a positive welcome overall to the Government’s Alcohol Strategy and it welcomed the decision to introduce a minimum unit price for alcohol. The 4 key recommendations from the report are: The Committee [read the full story…]
We don’t have accurate statistics on the numbers of children living with alcohol misusing parents. It’s estimated that 79,000 babies in England are living with a parent who is classified as a ‘problematic’ drinker (‘hazardous’ or ‘harmful’). The Office of the Children’s Commissioner has published a Rapid Evidence Assessment about the impact that alcohol misuse [read the full story…]
The NHS Information Centre have published their annual series of reports about alcohol use and misuse. The reports cover a range of issues including drinking habits and behaviours among adults (aged 16 and over) and school children (aged 11 to 15), drinking-related ill health and mortality, affordability of alcohol, alcohol related admissions to hospital and alcohol-related [read the full story…]
Today’s blog comes courtesy of The Lifestyle Elf. If you’re interested in healthy lifestyle research on diet, exercise, smoking, drinking and other public health issues, you can follow my cousin on Twitter, Facebook and via her excellent blog. When you’ve got a problem, where do you look for help, support and information? Here in the [read the full story…]
The government have published their new alcohol strategy for the United Kingdom. The last few years has seen a fall in the number of alcohol-related deaths in many other countries, but the UK has bucked this trend and has seen a rise in deaths from liver disease and an increase in hospital admissions related to [read the full story…]
Picture the scene: adolescent boy with an absentee father, trying to fend off a large crowd of men who occupy his house, cost him a lot in food and drink and are all determined to marry his mother. He is young, inexperienced, lacking in confidence and besieged by problems. In short, he needs a mentor. [read the full story…]
All mental health professionals are well aware that depression and alcohol misuse frequently go hand in hand. One condition often complicates and affects the outcome of the other. NICE guidelines recommend treating the alcohol problems first and then after 3-4 weeks of abstinence focus on treating the comorbid mental illness if it’s still present. This [read the full story…]
Readers interested in preventing alcohol misuse in young people will find these two new systematic reviews from the Cochrane Library worth looking at in more detail. Both reviews have been conducted by researchers from Brookes University in Oxford, who searched for randomised controlled trials including school aged children up to 18 years old. The first [read the full story…]
Alcohol misuse is common in people with mental health problems and the rates of drinking are particularly high in bipolar disorder. Studies show that the lifetime prevalence of substance use disorders is at least 40% in bipolar I patients (ref Cerullo et al). Researchers from Newcastle University in the UK have conducted a systematic review [read the full story…]
Every once in a while the Cochrane library publish an overview of reviews to summarise the evidence for a specific intervention. Such an overview has recently been made available to bring together all of the Cochrane reviews that assess the effectiveness and safety of pharmacological interventions in the treatment of alcohol withdrawal. The overview brings [read the full story…]
