Prevalence and associated factors of alcoholic beverages consumption and abuse in medical students of Universidad Católica de Cuenca, May-December 2018

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Risky consumption of alcoholic beverages in students is a concern for both public and private universities in our country. The possibility of addiction in the university population is a problem of great interest because, in addition to health repercussions it can influence the profile of the professionals in training; so it is imperative to detect the problem to prevent it, but to date no studies on its prevalence or characteristics have been carried out locally. For this reason, we have raised the following research question: What are the prevalence and the associated factors of alcoholic beverages consumption and abuse in medical students of Universidad Católica de Cuenca between May and December of 2018? METHODS: Quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional study that analyzed the data of 298 medical students from the School of Medicine of UCACUE, obtained by simple random sampling, whose alcohol consumption was determined, under informed consent, with the application of the AUDIT (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test). Statistical analysis was performed with IBM-SPSSTM version. 20.0 in Spanish, calculating the Chi-Square with a 95% confidence interval, considering the values of p <0.05 as significant. RESULTS: The prevalence of alcohol consumption was 74.5%. With the application of the AUDIT it was possible to determine a risk consumption of 15.1%, a harmful consumption of 2.3% and alcohol dependence values in 1.3% of the cases. A higher risk of alcoholism was observed in males (p = 0.029), in middle social class (p = 0.035), in those who had family history of alcoholism (p = 0.014) and in those who had emotional instability (p = <0.001). CONCLUSION: There is a high rate of alcoholic beverages consumption among medical students at Universidad Católica de Cuenca (74.5%), with a higher frequency of cases in males, in the middle social class, in those who had a family history of alcoholism and in those who had emotional instability.