Time of injury in light of prior-to-injury and usual alcohol consumption: an emergency department study

Hervé Kuendig¹, Lucie Laflamme², Gerhard Gmel¹, Jean-Bernard Daeppen³, Marie Hasselberg<sup>2

1</sup>Addiction Info Switzerland, Research Institute, Lausanne, Switzerland; ²Department of Public Health Sciences, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; ³Alcohol Treatment Center, Lausanne University Hospital, Lausanne, Switzerland

Purpose: To investigate how prior-to-injury and usual alcohol consumption relate to time of injury.

Patients and methods: The associations between injury time of day and day of week and prior-to-injury (labeled as “acute”) alcohol intake and hazardous usual alcohol consumption (considered from the point of view of both heavy episodic drinking [HED] and risky volumes of consumption) are assessed using interview data from a randomized sample of 486 injured patients treated in a Swiss emergency department (ED; Lausanne University Hospital).

Results: Acute consumption was associated with both injury time of day and day of week, HED with day of week only, and risky volume with none.

Conclusions: Acute consumption and HED, but not risky volume of consumption, show specific time distributions for injuries. These findings highlight the potential importance of considering the time dimension of an injury when providing emergency care and have additional implications for interventions aimed at influencing the alcohol consumption of injured patients presenting to the ED.

Keywords: acute alcohol consumption, volume of consumption, heavy episodic drinking, trauma patients