Lifetime alcoholism rates among American Indian men from two geographic
areas were 50 percent higher than national rates, but fell far short of
previous reports that 70 percent to 80 percent of these men were alcoholics,
say Paul Spicer, Ph.D., of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center
and colleagues.
“The rates in this study are indeed quite high and of serious concern
to health policy makers and planners, but the prevalence of alcohol dependence
is not nearly as high as stereotypes of the drunken Indian may lead people
to believe,” Spicer says.
The study was published in the November issue of Alcoholism:
Clinical and Experimental Research.
Alcoholism rates among American Indian women varied, the researchers found.
Women from tribes in the Northern Plains had twice the rate of alcoholism
as a national sample, but those from Southwestern tribes had rates comparable
to the national average.
Spicer and colleagues say that earlier studies of the
prevalence of Indian alcoholism relied on family or clinic-based samples
of the population, “raising
concerns about possible bias in their estimates of alcohol dependence
at the community level.”
To remedy this, the researchers used a community-wide sample of Indians
who lived on or near the reservations of two culturally and geographically
distinct tribes. The study included 1,446 people from the Southwestern
tribe and 1,638 people from the Northern Plains tribe.
Although rates of alcoholism among American Indian men were high, Spicer
and colleagues found many teetotalers as well.
“Generally women were more likely to be lifetime nondrinkers than
men were. And especially among men, American Indians were more likely to
be lifetime nondrinkers than were others in the U.S. population,” Spicer
says.
The researchers also found that socioeconomic factors, like marriage,
poverty and unemployment, were not consistently related to rates of alcoholism
in any of the groups studied.
For instance, marriage was linked to decreased rates of alcoholism in
the Southwestern tribe but did not affect rates for the Northern Plains
tribe. Unemployment was associated with increased rates in the Northern
Plains, but not in the Southwest.
The study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the
National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Center
for Minority Health and Health Disparities.
