Identifying College Fraternity/Sorority Members At-Risk For Injury

Members or pledges of college fraternities and sororities are twice as likely as non-Greek students to get drunk at least weekly and are at higher risk of being injured or injuring someone else. Research suggests that a simple screening question - "In a typical week, how many days do you get drunk?" - may help identify students at highest risk of injury from drinking.


The question was asked of 10,635 college students chosen randomly from ten North Carolina universities. Of the 912 fraternity/sorority members and 419 pledges who answered the web-based survey on alcohol use and its consequences, 60% reported getting drunk at least weekly. Pledges who reported getting drunk at least weekly had five times the risk of falling from a height and two and a half times the risk of being burned than non-Greek students who do not get drunk. Female pledges and members who got drunk weekly had more than twice the risk of being sexually assaulted than non-Greek females who did not get drunk. Member or pledge status in a Greek organization and "getting drunk" were significant independent predictors of increased injury.


The study is "Single Question About Drunkenness to Detect College Fraternity/Sorority Members At-Risk For Injury" and will be presented by Mary Claire O'Brien MD. Her co-authors are Thomas P. McCoy MS, Heather Champion PhD, Erin Sutfin, PhD, Scott Rhodes, PhD, Mark Wolfson PhD, and Robert H. DuRant PhD. This paper will be presented at the 2006 SAEM Annual Meeting, May 18-21, 2006, San Francisco, CA on Saturday, May 20, 2006 at approximately 2:15 PM in Salons 1-3 of the San Francisco Marriott. Abstracts of the papers presented are published in the May issue of the official journal of the SAEM, Academic Emergency Medicine.


About The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine

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The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) is a national non-profit organization of over 6,000 academic emergency physicians, emergency medicine residents and medical students. SAEM's mission is to improve patient care by advancing research and education in emergency medicine. SAEM's vision is to promote ready access to quality emergency care for all patients, to advance emergency medicine as an academic and clinical discipline, and to maintain the highest professional standards as clinicians, teachers, and researchers. The SAEM Annual Meeting attracts approximately 2,000 medical students, residents and academic emergency physicians. It provides the largest forum for the presentation of original research in the specialty of Emergency Medicine.


About Academic Emergency Medicine

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The SAEM's official journal, Academic Emergency Medicine, is published by Elsevier. Established in 1994, Academic Emergency Medicine is a monthly peer-reviewed journal that publishes material relevant to the practice, education, and investigation of emergency medicine, and reaches a wide audience of emergency care practitioners and educators. Each issue contains a broad range of topics relevant to the improvement of emergency, urgent or critical care of the acutely ill or injured patient. Regular features include original research, preliminary reports, education & practice and annotated literature.


About Elsevier

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Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier's 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect (sciencedirect), MD Consult (mdconsult), Scopus (info.scopus), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.