QUESTION UNDER STUDY To investigate the change over time in the number of ED admissions with positive blood alcohol concentration (BAC) and to evaluate predictors of BAC level. METHODS We conducted a single site retrospective study at the ED of a tertiary referral hospital (western part of Switzerland) and obtained all the BAC performed from 2002 to 2011. We determined the proportion of ED ad...

A group of 38 volunteers participated in 74 experiments with multiple collection of blood and saliva samples and simultaneous breath testing. BAC/BrAC, BAC/SAC and SAC/BrAC ratios were calculated for every sampling time for each examined person in each experiment. It gave 975 values of the distribution ratio of ethanol for each system. The mean values of BAC/BrAC ratio calculated for absorption...

BACKGROUND In Brazil the legal blood alcohol content (BAC) allowed for driving was changed to zero in 2008. If the BAC found is above 0.6g/L, drivers may be arrested. However, there are limited data on drivers' awareness of such limits. METHODS Drivers from 27 major metropolitan areas (n=3397) were randomly asked to participate in roadside survey from 12 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Fridays and Saturda...

Previous works investigated a spectroscopic technique that offered a promising alternative to blood and breath assays for determining in vivo alcohol concentration. Although these prior works measured the dorsal forearm, we report the results of a 26-subject clinical study designed to evaluate the spectroscopic technique at a finger measurement site through comparison to contemporaneous forearm...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to refine a commercial car driving simulation for occupational research. As the effects of ethanol on driving behavior are well established, we choose alcohol as a test compound to investigate the performance of subjects during simulation. MATERIALS AND METHODS We programmed a night driving scenario consisting of monotonous highway and a rural road on ...

A multi-center case-control study was conducted on 3398 fatally-injured drivers to assess the effect of alcohol and drug use on the likelihood of them being culpable. Crashes investigated were from three Australian states (Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia). The control group of drug- and alcohol-free drivers comprised 50.1% of the study population. A previously validated method o...

Little is known about the factors associated with undetermined death classifications among African Americans. In this study, the rates of undetermined deaths were assessed, the prevalence of missing information was estimated, and whether the circumstances preceding death differ by race were examined. Data were derived from the 2005-2008 National Violent Death Reporting System. African Americans...

BACKGROUND It is principally the area of enforcement that offers the greatest opportunity for reducing alcohol-impaired driving in the near future. How much of a reduction in drinking and driving would be achieved by how much improvement in enforcement intensity? METHODS We developed logistic regression models to explore how enforcement intensity (6 different measures) related to the prevalen...

What's "too much" alcohol for a person will vary, based on a number of factors. Thinking about the immediate effects of alcohol consumption, the extent to which alcohol impacts health and behavior is directly related to blood alcohol concentration (BAC). A person's BAC varies, depending on the amount of alcohol consumed and how quickly it's metabolized. Metabolism may be affected by such factor...

This Research Note emphasizes recent trends in the number of alcohol-impaired drivers involved in fatal crashes, by the gender of the driver as well as the State where the fatal crash occurred. This analysis was performed in light of recent data1 from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that depicted a recent increasing trend in the number of female drivers arrested for driving under the influe...