Worried that you drink too much? A new app may help you cut down.
Research conducted among students with “unhealthy” alcohol habits found that the Smaart app helped them to reduce both their overall intake and number of days on which they binge drank.
The study, reported on Wednesday in the BMJ, concluded that using the app on their smartphone had a “significant” impact on moderating students’ drinking behaviour.
Researchers found that a year after downloading Smaart, students were consuming 10% less alcohol a week and having 11% fewer days a month on which they binged, which was classified as at least five drinks for men and four for women.
The results are the latest evidence that digital interventions can be effective for drinkers who are concerned about their intake and who want to consume less.
Experts welcomed the drop in alcohol consumption as “positive”. But they also said drink-less apps were “no magic fix” towards achieving the World Health Organization’s goal of achieving a 20% fall in harmful use of alcohol by 2030.
In the randomised controlled trial, 738 university students in Switzerland with a history of “unhealthy alcohol use” used the app on average 21.2 times each over the next year.
“Compared with the group who were not given the intervention, providing access to the app for 12 months was effective at reducing the average drinking volume of university students who had self-reported unhealthy alcohol use at baseline,” the lead author Nicolas Bertholet, of Lausanne university hospital and the University of Lausanne, and colleagues wrote in the BMJ.
When they assessed participants a year after the trial began the academics found “significantly lower drinking volumes in the intervention group than in the control group” in terms of the number of alcoholic drinks they had every week.
The app also had “a significant main effect” on reducing students’ heavy drinking days. It sought to help users drink less by giving them personalised feedback, for example by telling them how many other Swiss people of the same age were drinking less than them and how many calories were in the drinks they consumed and how many hamburgers that equated to.
Excess alcohol intake is known to pose the biggest risk to the health of people aged 15 to 49 years old, and students are known to drink more than most other young adults.
Dr Sadie Boniface, the head of research at the Institute of Alcohol Studies and a visiting researcher at King’s College London, said the results were “promising”. She added: “[The study] adds to a growing evidence base suggesting apps can have a small but meaningful effect.”
In 2020 the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence advised health professionals that digital and mobile health interventions could help people drink less but that they should be used in conjunction with support from existing services, not alone.
“Apps are also only really suitable for people drinking at increasing or higher risk levels, but not with severe alcohol use disorder or dependence on alcohol, who require much more intensive support,” said Boniface.
Martin McKee, a professor of public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “Individual measures such as these cannot be a substitute for the measures we know work, addressing price, availability and marketing, while countering the ever more ingenuous efforts by the alcohol industry to increase their sales.”
A spokesperson for the charity Drinkaware said that its own app, which helps people to keep track of their drinking and plan drink-free days, had been downloaded more than 294,000 times since it was launched in 2021.
