Abstract BackgroundAround a quarter to a third of adults in England experience health risk or harm due to heavy drinking. Most of this risk and harm is preventable, if drinking is reduced. This project builds on two Cochrane reviews that reported that digitally and verbally delivered interventions both reduced hazardous and harmful alcohol consumption by 2.5 to 3 UK units per week.
Methods
We combined direct and indirect data in network meta-analyses to assess comparative effectiveness of interventions, using quantity of alcohol and heavy episodic drinking (HED) as outcomes. We explored heterogeneity in a separate analysis. Finally, we developed an economic model to quantify the main uncertainties and conduct an exploratory value of information analysis to assess the extent to which further research is worth pursuing to reduce these uncertainties.
Results
Although few studies directly compared digitally with verbally delivered brief alcohol interventions, many trials have a control or minimal intervention arm that provided indirect evidence. Ninety four studies contributed data to the analysis reporting quantity of alcohol in grams per week, and 48 to the analysis reporting HED.
Conclusion
This work is ongoing, and will help policy-makers understand the relative effect size, likely duration and active components of each intervention approach, and develop efficient strategies to help achieve wide scale roll out of alcohol intervention to help reduce health harm. Since alcohol harms are disproportionately experienced by those in lower socio-economic status groups this work is likely to reduce health and social inequities in England. External funding details NIHR SPHR (PD-SPH-2015-10025)