Recovering from alcoholism is similar to recovering from cancer: You need to be symptom-free for five years to be out of danger of relapse, says the author of a new study.
The study tracked the lives and drinking of alcohol abusers for 50 years, probably longer than any other study, researchers said.A surprising finding was that poor, inner-city alcoholics recovered at a higher rate than college-educated upper- or middle-class alcoholics, presumably because the poor drinkers "hit bottom" faster.
"It's hard work to give up alcohol forever, and it helps if you're really hurting, which is hopeful in the sense that people who you wouldn't think would recover do," said the study's author, Dr. George E. Vaillant of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
Vaillant's findings were published in the March issue of the American Medical Association's Archives of General Psychiatry, a theme issue on alcoholism.
Vaillant studied 724 men, all originally recruited as healthy youths during the late 1930s and early 1940s by researchers who were exploring topics other than alcoholism but who also gathered data on alcohol abuse.
The subjects were 456 adolescents from inner-city Boston and 268 Harvard University sophomores.
Of the 129 inner-city youths who eventually became alcohol abusers, 37 percent had achieved sobriety for three or more years by the time the study ended, when they were 60.
Of the 52 college-educated men who eventually became alcohol abusers, only 19 percent achieved sobriety of three years or longer by study's end, when they were 70.
"The good news is that a lot of alcoholics make stable recoveries, in the same way people do from cigarette smoking, and the bad news is that a lot die young from alcoholism," Vaillant said.
One-quarter of the inner-city abusers were dead by age 60, and 15 percent of the college-educated abusers were dead by that age.
Of the men who achieved sobriety, 40 percent did so through Alcoholics Anonymous, their biggest source of help in recovery.