This is the first brief intervention work on risky drinking with college students in Brazil and the results are encouraging. However, it is difficult to conduct individual prevention strategies in a country where culture fosters heavy drinking through poor public policy on alcohol and lack of law enforcement.

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The results underscore the importance of the association between alcohol use and risk of aggression between intimate partners, and may contribute to the design of public policies aimed to control this situation.

The objectives of this study are to identify the pattern of alcohol use among the elderly and to analyze its association with falls. A populationbased survey was conducted in a sample of Metropolitan São Paulo, Brazil, using IntroductionRecently, the number of people aged over 60 has markedly increased in many parts of the world, particularly in low-and middle-income countries 1 . In Brazil, it is estimated that by the year 2050 almost 20% of the population will be over 65 years of age 2 , with a significant impact on financing the national health system 3 .Although alcohol consumption is usually lower among the elderly when compared to younger subjects, its negative consequences can be higher, due to age-related physiological changes. The elderly have increased body fat and a reduction of the body non-fat mass and water, as well as a decrease in hepatic metabolism 4 . As a consequence, alcohol blood levels increase and the elderly start to undergo adverse consequences of alcohol ingestion even without increasing consumption 4 . Another important problem is related to the fact that a considerable proportion of the elderly population is under some form of medication with potential interactions with alcohol. Paskulin & Viana 5 studied elderly people in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil, and observed that only 23% of the sample did not use any medication. The differences between young adults and the elderly are so marked that it has been suggested that the latter should drink no more than only one drink per day, if there are no absolute contraindications due to the presence of some disease or use of medication 6 . In spi-ARTIGO ARTICLE