Medical and social implications of alcohol use among adult women in a rural area of Ranchi, Jharkhand: A cross-sectional study.

Abstract

The harmful use of alcohol is increasing at a huge pace leading to the occurrence of multiple diseases and has become a leading risk factor for global burden of diseases. The aim of this study is to assess the health profile of adult women and to find out the medical and social effects of alcohol consumption. A cross-sectional study was conducted in the rural field practice area, Ormanjhi of RIMS, Ranchi, for a duration of 27 months (September 2016 to November 2018) among 336 women by multistage random sampling. A pretested semi-structured questionnaire was used for data collection. Templates were generated in MS Excel sheet and analysis of data was done using SPSS software (20.0). The mean BMI of the study subjects was 21.62 ± 3.33 kg/m². Anaemia was present in 42.6% of the women, 10.4% women were hypertensive and 9.2% were suffering from diabetes. The association between alcohol consumption and occurrence of co-morbidities was found insignificant. The social effects of alcoholism varied ranging from going into debts seen in 35.42% of the women; 62.5% of the women were criticised about their drinking habit by relatives or children. About 9.5% of the women were found to consume alcohol during their last pregnancy, and among women who were on regular intake of alcohol even during pregnancy, majority (65.62%) of them delivered by normal vaginal delivery. Alcohol consumption among females caused several adverse social consequences without any significant effect on health.