Alcoholism Among Outpatients of a Rural District General Hospital in Kenya

Abstract

This article presents the results of a study of alcoholism among outpatients of a rural district hospital in Kenya. One hundred and twelve outpatients aged 18 years or over attending Kisii District Hospital were interviewed using the alcohol section of the Diagnostic Instrument Schedule (DIS). The participants consisted of 56 males and 56 females. Of these, 54% of the males and 25% of the females met the DIS criteria for alcohol abuse and/or alcoholism. Those classified as alcoholics differed significantly from the non-alcoholics on variables associated with sex, age, past marital state, religion and types of alcoholic drinks consumed. No significant differences were found with respect to present marital state, education, occupation, family size, age of first intoxication or physical illness.

Alcohol‐related problems in primary care patients in Nigeiia

“…It was observed that none of the cases with alcohol dependence or alcohol-related problems were detected by the primary health care workers, and none of the patients discussed their drinking with the PHC workers. A similar observation was made by Nielsen et al (23) in a study of alcoholism among out-patients in a rural district general hospital in Kenya. The generally low detection rates of alcohol problems by health workers in general hospital units and primary health care facilities have been noted in some previous studies (10)(11)(12)22).…”

Alcohol-related disorders among medical and surgical in-patients in a Nigerian teaching hospital

“…Reported identification rates from developed countries ranged between 7% and 89% depending on whether it was based on just a specialty or the entire hospital. [46][47][48][49][50] Studies in developing countries have reported that health workers do not normally detect ARP in patients under their care [9,43,44] The 10.9% reported in the current study is still an indication that clinicians need to improve on their ability to detect ARP in their patients. However a limitation of the present study is the use of rate of documentation of ARP by the managing clinicians to be synonymous with rate of detection.…”

“…These cultural factors are thus responsible for the observation that generally in developing countries alcohol use, abuse, and dependence occur predominantly among the male population. [9,10,43,44] It was found from this study that significantly more middle-aged (45-64 years) and more people with lower educational status had AUD and ARP compared to abstainers. These findings are similar to results obtained in studies from both developed and developing countries [29,34] but differ from other studies from similar settings in the developed countries that reported AUD to be significantly more in younger people of lower socioeconomic status, unmarried, divorced men or divorced, and cohabiting females.…”

Alcohol drinking patterns among high school students in Ethiopia: a cross-sectional study

“…This is a common finding in substance use studies where males use substances more and show higher tendency for dependence than females. Apart from measurement and reporting issues [32,33], it could mainly be explained by higher exposure opportunities due to reasons such as psychological, family and social factors [32,34,35]. The findings also indicate that having friends who drink alcohol and living with people who drink alcohol are very strong predictors of alcohol use among the sample studied.…”