Study Finds that 40% of Sports Fans Have Booze in their Blood

Posted & filed under Car Insurance, DUI.

As we near Super Bowl Sunday, consider this: a new study has found that 40% of those leaving professional football and baseball games had alcohol in their bloodstream, and 8 percent of attendees were too drunk to legally drive.

While this study does have some limitations – it doesn’t disclose the locations of the games, excludes fans who are not old enough to legally drink, and only counts people who agreed to take part, the findings do point to a significant risk of encountering a drunk driver, caused by drinking at sporting events, at least according to the study’s lead author Darin Erickson, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota.

Erickson explained, “It may not seem like a lot when you say 8 percent leaving a game were above the legal limit, when you look at a big stadium that has 5,000 attendees,” and added that over time, “…if you look at the hundreds to thousands of games, this is a lot of intoxicated individuals.”

The study was published online, and will appear in the April, 2011 issue of the journal, Clinical and Experimental Research. One purpose of the study was to determine the feasibility of asking fans to submit to Breathalyzer tests and questionnaires as they leave a stadium. To this end, researchers approached the fans of thirteen Major League Baseball games and three National Football League games in 2006. They recruited 382 people to participate, with roughly 60% of them being men, and 55% being between the ages of 21 and 35. Only 14% of those who participated were over the age of 51.

In addition to the blood alcohol content mentioned above, the study found that those who had been tailgating before the game, and those under the age of 35, were much more likely to be drinking.

It is not clear how many of those surveyed were planning to drive home.