Abstract
AimsThis paper estimates how far monthly changes in prevalence of cigarette smoking, motivation to quit and attempts to stop smoking have been associated with changes in prevalence of high‐risk drinking, and motivation and attempts to reduce alcohol consumption in England.DesignData were used from the Alcohol and Smoking Toolkit Studies between April 2014 and June 2016. These involve monthly household face‐to‐face surveys of representative samples of ~1700 adults in England.MeasurementsAutoregressive Integrated Moving Average with Exogeneous Input (ARIMAX) modelling was used to assess the association over time between monthly prevalence of (a) smoking and high‐risk drinking; (b) high motivation to quit smoking and high motivation to reduce alcohol consumption; and (c) attempts to quit smoking and attempts to reduce alcohol consumption.FindingsMean smoking prevalence over the study period was 18.6% and high‐risk drinking prevalence was 13.0%. A decrease of 1% of the series mean smoking prevalence was associated with a reduction of 0.185% of the mean prevalence of high‐risk drinking 2 months later [95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.033 to 0.337, P = 0.017]. A statistically significant association was not found between prevalence of high motivation to quit smoking and high motivation to reduce alcohol consumption (β = 0.324, 95% CI = –0.371 to 1.019, P = 0.360) or prevalence of attempts to quit smoking and attempts to reduce alcohol consumption (β = −0.026, 95% CI = –1.348 to 1.296, P = 0.969).ConclusionBetween 2014 and 2016, monthly changes in prevalence of smoking in England were associated positively with prevalence of high‐risk drinking. There was no significant association between motivation to stop and motivation to reduce alcohol consumption, or attempts to quit smoking and attempts to reduce alcohol consumption.
Highlights
In England in 2015, approximately 17% of the population were smokers and 20% were estimated to drink alcohol at high-risk levels [1,2]
There was a significant association between smoking and high-risk drinking prevalence: every 1% decrease from the series mean smoking prevalence was associated with a
100), which is associated with a 1.02% (i.e. 0.19 × 5.38) decline from the series mean of high-risk drinking prevalence
Summary
In England in 2015, approximately 17% of the population were smokers and 20% were estimated to drink alcohol at high-risk levels [1,2]. Smoking and high-risk alcohol consumption are major causes of a number of fatal diseases including cancer and cardiovascular disease [3]. Smoking and high-risk drinking have been found to be associated at an individual level; this study assessed whether a similar association holds true at a population level over time. High-risk drinkers are substantially more likely to smoke [6,7,8,9,10] and there is a positive association between the number of cigarettes smoked and alcohol consumption [11,12]. Several mechanisms may contribute to the association between alcohol and tobacco use, including genes involved in regulating neurotransmitters, cross-tolerance and crosssensitization to both drugs, conditioning mechanisms in Addiction
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