There are more than 1 million visits to the ER in a year because of excessive drinking. And if the findings from one emergency room in East Baltimore are any indication, Budweiser is consumed the most among people who are landing in the hospital.
The small study, published in the journal Substance Use and Misuse, looked at the most common beer brands consumed by people who visited the Johns Hopkins Hospital Emergency Department on Friday and Saturday nights from April 2010 to June 2011. Of all the people who came in during this time frame, researchers identified 105 who said that they had been drinking within the six hours before they got the injury requiring them to go to the hospital.
Researchers surveyed the study participants on the brands of alcohol they had been drinking, and found that those most highly consumed were Budweiser, Steel Reserve, Colt 45, Bud Ice and Bud Light.
NBC News pointed out that Budweiser also made up a higher percentage of beers consumed by the ER patients -- at 15 percent -- while it only makes up 9.1 percent of beers consumed in the general population.
Researchers noted that Steel Reserve, Colt 45, Bud Ice and King Cobra are all malt liquors and made up 46 percent of the beers consumed by the study participants, though in the general population, they only comprise 2.4 percent of consumed beers.
"Recent studies reveal that nearly a third of injury visits to Level I trauma centers were alcohol-related and frequently a result of heavy drinking," study researcher David Jernigan, Ph.D., director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in a statement. "Understanding the relationship between alcohol brands and their connection to injury may help guide policy makers in considering taxation and physical availability of different types of alcohol given the harms associated with them."
The Atlantic pointed out some potential caveats to the study, noting that the neighborhood the ER was located in may produce different beer brand results than an ER in a more affluent area.