Regardless of the specific trend explanations, it is clear that elevated binge drinking rates among older Americans correspond to a significant increase in alcohol-related morbidity. These observations shed some light on the apparent paradox between relatively small increases in per capita alcohol consumption and large increases in alcohol-related health problems (Yoon and Chen, 2016, Mullins et al, 2017, Haughwout and Slater, 2017, Mellinger et al, 2018). White and colleagues recently documented a 62% increase in the rate of alcohol-related emergency department visits over the years 2006 to 2015 (White et al., 2018). The largest increases were among individuals aged 45–64 and were due to increases in rates of visits for both chronic and acute conditions. Remarkably, baseline rates of visits were also highest for these ages, despite the fact that binge drinking rates are highest among younger age groups (Supplementary Table 7). Similarly, Kanny and colleagues (2015) found that 76% of fatal alcohol poisonings occur among men ages 35–64. Analyses presented here used different age categorizations than White and colleagues, so we cannot make direct comparisons, but the risk for
