PTSD, ADU & Gender

     In Dr. Amy Herrolds paper, “Alcohol use and craving among Veterans with mental health disorders and mild traumatic brain injury,” her and her colleagues examine self reported alcohol craving among Veterans that were previously deployed overseas with active mental health disorder (MHD) symptoms and with or without mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) symptoms. These reports were compared to self reported alcohol craving in healthy, asymptomatic veterans. The results reflected that Veterans with active MHD symptoms with or without mTBI symptoms self- reported higher alcohol craving than the healthy, asymptomatic veterans. In the study, 44 out of 48 participants were male. This led me to wonder if demographic plays any roll in PTSD and Alcohol use disorder, specifically gender.

     Dr. Emily Dworkins, and colleagues, work, “Co-Occurring Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Alcohol Use Disorder in U.S. Military and Veteran Populations”, analyzed the impacts of demographic on differential risks for PTSD and AUD. Dworkin found that there was a higher prevalence of PTSD in female veterans, 13- 19%, than in male veterans, 6-7%. This is likely due to the sexual assault of women in the military. About 22% of women in the military report they have been sexually assaulted, whereas only 1% of men in the military report they have been sexually assaulted. 

     Although men in the military report lower numbers of PTSD and sexual assault, they report more binge drinking in the past month than their female counterparts do. A possibility for this is the drinking culture associated with the military. Drinking is a bonding, recreational and stress relieving experience and can influence the perception of alcohol consumption norms. Military drinking culture has a large effect on Alcohol use in veterans because it is normalized as a way to relax that carries k err into life after service.

     In studies generalizing to the entire military, it would make sense for there to be an over representation of men just as there is in the Armed Forces, similar to a stratified sample where the subjects representation in the study is proportional to the representation in the population of interest. While gender does play a role in the prevalence of PTSD and alcohol use disorder, when making a statement generalizing to the U.S military rather than the entire U.S population, the differences caused by gender are negligible due to the over representation of men in this population.

Dworkin , Emily R, et al. “Co-Occurring Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Alcohol Use 

Disorder in U.S. Military and Veteran Populations.” 2018.

Herrold, Amy A., et al. “Alcohol Use and Craving among Veterans with Mental Health

Disorders and Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.” Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development, vol. 51, no. 9, 2014, pp. 1397–1410., doi:10.1682/jrrd.2013.07.0170.