Fractures on chest radiographs in detection of alcoholism

The prevalence of fractures seen on chest radiographs among alcoholics varies in various series from 36.0% to 8.7% while that for controls remains below 5%. The aim of our study was to find out whether the selection of the alcoholic subjects could account for this four-fold variation. We therefore chose two groups of alcoholics, group 1 consisting of 76 mainly unmarried or divorced lower class alcoholics who had attended the emergency department while intoxicated, and group 2 consisting of 108 mainly married middle class alcoholics with alcoholic liver cirrhosis. The control group consisted of 98 randomly chosen hospital patients. There was no significant difference between group 1 and group 2 in the prevalence of fractures detectable with chest radiography (25% and 21.3% respectively). 8.2% of the controls also had fractures. The fracture prevalence did not correlate with socioeconomic group. Married alcoholics had significantly less thoracic fractures than unmarried, divorced or widowed alcoholics as a group. The sensitivity and specificity of the fractures visible on chest radiograph as a marker for alcoholism is not sufficient to warrant its use in clinical or research work.