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That was, they estimated, a "very low" risk of drinking

March 6, 2018 by Carolyn Mueller

That was, they estimated, a "very low" risk of drinking in the United States and an "extremely high" risk in those countries.

The findings are not surprising. As Dr. Richard Hofmann, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California at Davis, puts it, "There's a great deal of research that indicates that drinking is a risk factor for the development of mental health problems and chronic disorders."

So what might those risks be in the United States and other countries where drinking is less prevalent, but still prevalent, than in almost all countries where it is high?

What about Mexico, Australia, Sweden?

The authors of the study say this is where they come up with a very different idea than many other studies have done of the relative risks of smoking and non-smokers.

"People of Mexican origin were more likely to be in the low-to-moderate range than those from other countries," says Michael D. McGlashan, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "One of the things I've noticed is that the magnitude of the differences is not that great. It's just that the relative risks are so large."

In other words, McGlashan says, "The magnitude of the differences is not that great."

The study does find that people of Mexican origin have a lower risk of developing mental and physical illnesses such as stroke, heart disease, Alzheimer's and other psychiatric conditions. But that makes it hard to separate the effects of drinking from drinking in other countries.

"There's no way to estimate the absolute risk of risk to the United States and other countries where drinking was the most prevalent," Hofmann says. "It's not as simple as one country. It's much more complicated. The results are really interesting."

A little more than half the American population is obese, and there are about 40 million people who are below the federal poverty level. That translates into roughly a quarter of the total number of people in the U.S. with diabetes and other conditions.

And if the study were to account for these differences in risks, McGlashan says, the odds that people of Mexican origin would be drinking significantly less or being slightly less likely to be overweight and obese would drop substantially as a result.

In fact, "if the absolute risk of alcohol-related mortality was 100 million fewer, then it would be in the ballpark," McGlashan says. It's a very, very large number.