Grant: Catalyst Grant: Alcohol research - Prevention, harm reduction, and treatment

Background: Alcohol use is one of the world's leading causes of disease and injury. Over 5.2 million people die worldwide yearly due to alcohol-related injuries. While there is growing information on traumatic physical injury and post injury mental disorders such as depression and anxiety, very little work has been done to determine if the presence of alcohol use adds to the effect of physical traumatic injury and the development of physical and mental disorders after injury. Objective: To better understand how alcohol affects outcomes after traumatic injury. Methods: We propose to compare people with alcohol related injuries with those injured without any alcohol to see if there are differences in the short term outcomes type of injuries (assault, motor vehicle, falls etc.), the number of operations, the need for critical care and death. We will also compare these two groups for long term outcomes over the years after injury to see if there are differences in mental disorders (depression etc.) or physical disorders (heart related etc.). We will also look at if persons with alcohol related injury are more likely to have repeated injuries. We will compare these two groups with a group of people from the general population who are not injured to make sure we account for any changes in the baseline general population. Outcomes from research: We will use the findings from this research to guide programs of intervention targeted to reduce the effect of alcohol related trauma.