The latest study is among the first to assess the effect of relatively small amounts of alcohol over long periods of time, drawing on a large population of women to provide new detail about the breast cancer risks associated with different patterns of drinking.
However, regions with high consumption of unrecorded alcohol also have higher incidence of liver cirrhosis, which cannot be explained by the volume and patterns of drinking alone [5].
Unlike settings with low-risk drinking patterns (classically southern European patterns of drinking with meals), sub-Saharan Africa is characterised by harmful patterns of drinking.
Seventeen percent (N = 9) of participants evidenced fluctuating patterns of drinking.
All of these factors could lead to a reduction of tolerance among IDUs for heavy patterns of drinking.
Patterns of drinking also may change depending on the social and/or physical contexts in which drinking episodes occur.
Worldwide, the highest proportion of heavy drinkers (18.9%) is in the region of Russia and the Ukraine, which is combined with conspicuous patterns of drinking behaviours [ 15- 17].
According to this model, two separate, but related, measures of alcohol consumption are responsible for most of the causal impact of alcohol on the burden of chronic diseases and conditions overall volume of alcohol consumption and patterns of drinking.
Although EMA has been used to examine the contexts in which drinking is likely to occur, results to date are largely descriptive, and less focus has been attributed to how patterns of drinking change across contexts.
These categories are based, in part, on US drinking definitions 18, 24 and allowed us to test and compare both EtG hair and EtG fingernail concentrations as long-term alcohol biomarkers (up to 3 months) based on typical weekly patterns of drinking.
