Ukraine, with a population of 46.2 million, is the second largest country in Europe, with an area of 603 700 km2. It is still recovering from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, following the Soviet stagnation era (since the mid-1960s) and perestroika (from 1986), as well as the 1998 Russian financial crisis and Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution. These events have resulted in high levels of socio-economic disparity, political instability and a degraded healthcare infrastructure. These issues, in addition to traditionally high levels of alcohol consumption, have made binge drinking and alcoholism, among other addictions, major problems in Ukrainian society (Voloshin et al, 2003).
The purpose of the work is to determine in the Ukrainian society the scale of harm inflicted by drinkers to other persons, as well as the gender and age characteristics of this harm. In four regions of Ukraine (Kharkiv, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia regions, Kyiv), during 2018-2020, 1,742 people were examined from three qualitatively different comparison groups: patients with alcohol dependence (393 people); their healthy relatives (274 people) and representatives of the general population (1075 people). The main research tool was the questionnaire of the international research consortium GENAHTO (Gender, Alcohol, and Harms to Others). It was shown that, in general, drinkers are present in the microsocial environment of 27.62 % of the surveyed healthy respondents. Extrapolation of this indicator to the entire population of Ukraine suggests that the total number of people who suffer in one way or another due to the drinkers in their environment is about 11.6 million people. In addition, the drinkers frequency in the environment of respondents can be used to determine the real number of people with alcohol problems in our country. Preliminary calculations indicate that this number is from 1.5 to 2.2 million people. The drinkers frequency in the environment of the respondents significantly depends on the age of the latter. The highest values of this indicator are characteristic of the respondents in the age category 40—59 years old” (31.43 % for men and 41.27 % for women). The subjective perception of harm from drinkers in the environment grows steadily with increasing age of the respondents, while this growth is most pronounced in women.
The purpose of the work is to study the adverse influence of drinkers on the alcohol status of representatives of their microsocial environment. In four regions of Ukraine (Kharkiv, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions, as well as the city of Kyiv), during 2018—2021, 1531 people were examined, who belonged to three qualitatively different comparison groups: patients with alcohol dependence (329 people); healthy relatives of alcohol-dependent patients (238 people) and representatives of the general population (964 people). The main research tools were the questionnaire of the international research consortium GENAHTO (Gender, Alcohol, and Harms to Others) and Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT). The obtained data were processed by methods of mathematical statistics (variance and cluster analysis) on a computer using Excel 2016 computational tables (with the Data Analysis package) and also the software package SPSS-15. It was shown that the presence of drinkers in the environment (DIE) of the men significantly increases the proportion of people with risky and dangerous alcohol consumption, as well as with probable alcohol dependence, while there was no such effect for women. It has been established that the direction of the influence of DIE on the alcohol status of women depends on the level of alcohol problems in DIE: the prenosological level of these problems in DIE contributes to the alcoholization of women; and the nosological level acts as an anti-risk factor for such alcoholization. It is shown that relatively small changes in the style of alcoholization of the respondents as a result of DIE exposure are accompanied by disproportionately large (many times greater!) changes in the indicators of the harmful effects of alcohol consumption and, especially, in indicators of dependence.
The purpose of the work is to study individual manifestations of adverse effects of drinking people on adults in their microsocial environment. In four regions of Ukraine (Kharkiv, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions, as well as the city of Kyiv), during 2018—2020, 1742 people were examined, who belonged to three qualitatively different comparison groups: patients with alcohol dependence (393 people); healthy relatives of alcohol-dependent patients (274 people) and representatives of the general population (1075 people). Of these surveyed, respondents were identified who had drinkers in the environment: 481 people among healthy people and 69 people among patients with alcohol dependence. Further research focused on this particular contingent. The main research tool was the questionnaire of the international research consortium GENAHTO (Gender, Alcohol, and Harms to Others). The obtained data were processed by methods of mathematical statistics (variance and correlation analysis) on a computer using Excel 2016 computational tables (with the Data Analysis package). The dependences of the frequency of manifestations of the adverse effects of drinkers on adults in their microsocial environment on the age, gender and attitude to alcohol of the respondents were described, and it was found that the most vulnerable contingent in terms of the adverse effects of drinkers are elderly (> 59 years old) women. The conjugation between the mentioned manifestations was analyzed and the corresponding quantitative measure is proposed — the conjugation index (CI). It has been shown that CI can play the role of a marker of the severity of the situation around respondent, which is in microsocial environment of the drinking person.
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