Thus, African Americans appear to be experiencing a higher frequency of alcohol-related problems at comparable levels of use (refer to Table 2 for a listing of studies reviewed). Although the majority of studies examined within the literature review were limited in that they did not specify the specific alcohol-related problems endorsed at the highest frequency among African Americans compared to European Americans, the majority of the national randomized studies cited (8 out of 10 cited studies) reported higher endorsement of alcohol dependence symptoms among African Americans compared to European Americans. As for DSM diagnosable alcohol dependence, findings were more mixed among nationally randomized samples. There appears to be a distinction between past year dependence and lifetime, showing that African Americans appear to report lower endorsement of alcohol dependence when the criterion is lifetime dependence, but higher rates when the time frame is past year. It is unclear at this time why such differences exist; this warrants further empirical investigation. With respect to health and social problems, studies using national randomized samples consistently found higher rates of health and social problems for African Americans.
