Excessive alcohol consumption contributes significantly to premature mortality, injuries and morbidity, and a range of U.S. state policies have been shown to reduce these behaviors. Monitoring state alcohol policy environments is essential, but methodologically challenging given that new laws may be passed (or repealed) each year, resulting in considerable variation across states. Existing measures have not been made public or have only a single year available. We develop a new replicable measure, the state alcohol policy score, for each state and year 2004–2009, that captures the essential features of a state’s evidence-based alcohol policies. We evaluate its similarity to two existing alcohol policy measures and validate it by replicating findings from a previous study that used one of those measures to assess its relationship with several binge drinking outcomes. Estimates of the association between one-year lagged state alcohol policy scores and state binge drinking outcomes, obtained from the 2005–2010 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System surveys (n = 440,951, 2010), were produced using Generalized Linear Models that controlled for state and individual-level co-variates, with fixed effects for year and region. We find a 10-percentage point increase in the state alcohol policy score was associated with a 9% lower odds of binge drinking (aOR = 0.91, 95% CI 0.89, 0.92; N = 1,992,086), a result consistent for men, women and for most age and race subgroups. We find that gender gaps in binge drinking behaviors narrowed in states with higher state alcohol policy scores. These results were nearly identical to those found in other studies using different scores obtained with the aid of expert opinions. We conclude that the score developed here is a valid measure that can be readily updated for monitoring and evaluating the variation and impact of state alcohol policies and make available our state scores for the years of the study.
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机译：过量饮酒会导致过早死亡，受伤和发病，并且美国的一系列州级政策已显示出减少这些行为的能力。监测州酒精政策环境至关重要，但由于每年可能会通过（或废除）新法律，从而导致各州之间的差异很大，因此在方法上存在挑战。现有措施尚未公开或只有一年可用。我们针对2004-2009年每个州和州制定了一项新的可复制措施，即州酒精政策评分，该指标反映了州基于证据的酒精政策的基本特征。我们评估了其与两项现有酒精政策措施的相似性，并通过复制先前研究的发现来验证其有效性，该研究使用这些措施之一评估了其与若干酗酒结果的关系。使用2005年至2010年行为风险因素监测系统调查（n = 440,951，2010）获得的一年滞后状态酒精政策得分与状态狂饮结果之间的关联性估算，使用控制状态和状态的广义线性模型得出个人级别的协变量，对年份和地区具有固定影响。我们发现州酒精政策得分提高10个百分点与暴饮暴食几率降低9％有关（aOR = 0.91，95％CI 0.89，0.92; N = 1,992,086），这一结果与男性，女性和适用于大多数年龄和种族分组。我们发现，在州饮酒政策得分较高的州，狂欢饮酒行为的性别差距有所缩小。这些结果与在其他研究中发现的结果几乎完全相同，其他研究是使用专家意见获得的不同分数。我们得出的结论是，此处得出的分数是一种有效的度量，可以随时更新以监控和评估州酒精政策的变化和影响，并提供研究年份的州分数。
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