Drunk people account for 70% of weekend emergency room visits in UK city

The lads from the film World's End know when to start drinking. (credit: Universal Pictures)

A study conducted in the city of Newcastle, UK, has revealed what you always suspected. Over two-thirds of emergency room visits on weekends, especially in the wee hours of the morning, are directly related to alcohol consumption.

Newcastle University health researcher Kathryn Parkinson and her colleagues examined health records from a local inner-city hospital over the 2010-11 year, looking for statistics on how many people were admitted for alcohol-related issues. Then they conducted breathalizer tests of people admitted to the same ER during 2012-13.

In an analysis of the data, the researchers uncovered several telling patterns. Though overall alcohol-related visits to the ER hovered around 15.2 percent in 2012-13, the numbers jumped dramatically on weekends, rising to 70 percent. The majority of those were young men, arriving in the late night or early morning—and most of them came from outside the city. "Traumatic injury was the most common reason for attendance [at the hospital]," Parkinson and her colleagues write in a paper published yesterday in Emergency Medicine Journal. But "psychiatric problems" were a close second.