New Delhi, Sept. 23 -- LOS ANGELES - Among the patients Brian P. Lee sees each week at Keck Medicine of USC in Los Angeles are men and women in their 50s who drink more now than they did before the pandemic, not by choice exactly, but by accumulation. The pattern had been building in clinical observation long before a dataset could confirm it. On Monday, it got one.

A major study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on September 22 found that alcohol consumption among American adults declined for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, based on survey data from more than 114,000 adults between 2018 and 2024. The drop is real, and researchers are careful not to oversell it. Overall consumption remains above pre-pa...