Epidemic adolescent binge drinking at Lollapalooza, a music festival in Chicago[1]
Summary
Retrospective chart review of adolescent (11-20 years) emergency department visits at Lurie Children's Hospital during Lollapalooza weekend and four summer comparison weekends in 2014 (n=356), combined with analysis of Illinois hospital discharge data for adolescent alcohol- and drug-related visits to all Chicago hospitals. Adolescents accounted for 25% of the department's visits on festival weekend versus 19% on comparison weekends. Festival-weekend patients were more often female, older, more often unsupervised, and less likely to live in the city. Of 31 underage festival attendees treated, 84% were intoxicated with blood alcohol content between 88 and 328 mg/dL. Citywide there was an eleven-fold increase in adolescent alcohol-related hospital visits during festival weekend compared with an average weekend. Drug intoxication was much less common.
So what
The eleven-fold citywide signal is the number that matters for planning, because it lands on hospitals across a region rather than on the event's own medical footprint. An event whose on-site presentation numbers look unremarkable can still be generating that signal, which means on-site data alone cannot tell a medical director whether their event is imposing a regional burden. Note also that the alcohol burden is adolescent and the supervision failure is the same one Thierbach documented in ten-year-olds a decade and a half earlier: unsupervised, and not local.
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- Publisher (DOI) ↗may be paywalled
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