Purpose:

To evaluate the pattern of alcohol consumption and the factors associated with high-risk alcohol consumption in undergraduate health science students in Aracaju/SE.

Methods:

This was a cross-sectional study with 1,147 first year students of Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, Physiotherapy and Nutrition of two universities in Greater Aracaju; one public university and one private. The instruments were two self-administered questionnaires, one to identify the general characteristics of the students and the other the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test. Descriptive statistics were developed and the dependent variable was dichotomized for subsequent logistic regression. The chi-square test was applied to test the association between high-risk alcohol consumption and the other variables studied. The level of significance was 5%.

Results:

It was found that 80.7% of the sample population had consumed alcoholic beverages at least once in their lives and that 68.8% had ingested alcohol in the last year. The mean age at onset of alcohol testing was 15.82 years. The pattern of risk consumption was demonstrated in 21.1% of the students and was positively associated with male (OR = 2.94), private education institution (OR = 1.59), smoker (OR = 5.99) (OR = 2.35), use associated with energy drinks (OR = 1.83), drink driving (OR = 1.85), driving with a drunk driver (OR = 3.16) and use of other drugs (OR = 1.84).

Conclusion:

A precocious start to experimenting with alcohol and a high prevalence of high-risk alcohol consumption was observed among the health science undergraduate students in Aracaju/ SE. The risk factors most strongly associated with this pattern of consumption were smoking, driving with a drunk driver and being male.

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