2026-09-23 from ctvnews.ca

Nearly seven years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Brian P. Lee has seen signs that rates of alcohol use had finally begun to drop. Lee, a hepatologist and liver transplant specialist with Keck Medicine of USC in Los Angeles, hopes the data is true of the general population.

The pandemic brought on a surge of alcohol consumption in 2020 that had not declined two years later. During that time, Lee watched his waiting rooms fill up with people who had liver-related diseases—even young people in their 20s needing liver transplants from alcohol use. That’s something he hadn’t seen before the pandemic.

Lee, author of a study published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that any alcohol use, including heavy drinking, among adults in the U.S. declined from 2022 to 2024. However, the rates are still higher than they were in 2018.

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