Abstract
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has impacted the lives of people worldwide since being declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Social restrictions aimed at flattening the curve may be associated with an increase in stress and anxiety, which may increase the use of alcohol as a coping mechanism. The objective of this study was to examine if stress and anxiety were associated with changes in alcohol use in a sample of adult twins. Twins allowed us to control for genetic and shared environmental factors that would confound the alcohol - mental health relationship. Twins (N = 3,971; 909 same-sex pairs) from the Washington State Twin Registry (WSTR) completed an online survey examining several health-related behaviors and outcomes and their self-reported changes due to COVID-19. About 14% of the respondents reported an increase in alcohol use. We found an association between both stress and anxiety and increased alcohol use, where twins with higher levels of stress and anxiety were more likely to report an increase in alcohol consumption. The associations were small and confounded by between-family factors and demographic characteristics. However, there was no significant difference in stress or anxiety levels between non-drinkers and those who reported no change in alcohol use. Our findings suggest that individuals’ mental health may be associated with changes in alcohol use during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Highlights
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has impacted the lives of people worldwide since being declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020 [1]
Twins with higher stress levels were more likely to report a decrease in alcohol use instead of similar alcohol use
Twins with higher levels of anxiety were more likely to report an increase in alcohol use rather than similar alcohol use
Summary
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has impacted the lives of people worldwide since being declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020 [1]. There is an extensive literature on the use of alcohol as a coping mechanism in response to stressful life events at the micro level, such as divorce [2], unemployment [3, 4], and social isolation [5], and at the macro level, such as terrorist attacks [6,7,8,9], natural disasters [10,11,12,13], and economic recessions [3, 14,15,16] These studies consistently found an increase in alcohol use, heavy drinking, among individuals exposed to stressful or traumatic events. Longitudinal studies of individuals exposed to a single traumatic event, such as a terrorist attack, found that post-traumatic stress symptoms were associated with an increase in alcohol use over time [7, 9, 13]
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