Research & Resources

Researchers wanted to understand how likely a person is to increase or decrease their alcohol use and whether tobacco or nicotine impacts alcohol use over time. They used two different years of the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions to see how people changed and whether nicotine was related to the change. They found that people who used tobacco but did not have alcohol use problems were more likely to increase their drinking than non-tobacco users. They also found women with both tobacco and alcohol use problems were more likely to decrease their drinking than women not using tobacco. The article, “Current tobacco use, nicotine dependence, and transitions across stages of alcohol involvement: A latent transition analysis approach,” was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. It was published in the International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research.