Non-smokers often have visceral reactions if someone lights up a cigarette nearby — the dangers of secondhand smoke are well-established, and it's usually clear when you're at risk.
Secondhand drinking, while not as obvious, could also be dangerous for your health, relationships, and finances, according to a study published June 30 in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
While smoking rates have dropped precipitously in recent decades, decreasing the likelihood of secondhand exposure, the majority of Americans are still exposed to secondhand drinking in their lifetimes.
Read more: 7 times you should never drink alcohol
More than half of Americans are exposed to secondhand alcohol harms in their lifetimes
If people around you are drinking, you could end up dealing with secondhand harms like property damage, threats, violence, relationship issues or financial woes. Some people appear to be more are risk than others.
The study included 8,750 adults in the US, interviewed via telephone in a 2015 survey. Researchers asked participants whether they had experienced harm caused by someone who was drinking, such as harassment, physical assault, financial trouble, or vandalism, in the past year.
Researchers estimated that across the total US population, secondhand harm from drinking affect an estimated 1 in 5 Americans every year.
As many as 53% of people are estimated to experience harm from someone else's drinking in their lifetime, according to Dr. Katherine Karriker Jaffe, co-author of the study and a scientist with the Alcohol Research Group.
Heavy drinkers of both sexes are especially at risk of experiencing negative affects related to someone else's drinking, according to the study. This risk especially significant for driving-related incidents — heavy drinkers were 12 times more likely to have been in an accident or in a car with a drunk driver than the rest of the population.
A majority of victims weren't necessarily drinking themselves during the incidents. But the study found that an overall pattern of heavy drinking — 4 or more drinks in a day for women, 5 or more drinks for men, at least once a month over the past year — significantly increased the risk of harm from someone else's drinking, too.
Research also found stark differences in the problems faced by men and women around alcohol use.
While women are more likely to suffer physical harm, harassment or financial harm from a heavy-drinking spouse, partner, or ex, men are more likely to report harm because of a stranger's drinking.
This risk is even greater for women who drink heavily themselves — they were 7 times more likely to report harm from physical aggression than women who didn't drink.
Dr. Karriker Jaffe said that this in no way suggests that victims are to blame in these incidents. "We don't know the mechanisms of this. It could suggest that women are more likely to be targeted when they are perceived as being drunk," she told INSIDER.
Research also shows that if someone drinks heavily, there is a high risk for their spouse or partner to also develop a drinking problem.
The gender disparity was even higher when the victim share a home with a heavy drinker; more than 92% of women living with a heavy drinker reported being physically harmed, compared with 28% of men.
Unlike previous research, this study found no correlation between poverty and secondhand harm from alcohol. Dr. Karriker Jaffe said that this is an area that could use more research, along with studies on specific contexts of heavy drinking behavior. She also hopes to study the impact of harm on quality of life, since research suggests alcohol use is more damaging from someone close to you, rather than a stranger or co-worker.
"This information should encourage us to think of solutions, to come up with effective alcohol policies to reduce drinking and therefore reduce the secondhand harms of that drinking," Dr. Karriker Jaffe said.
Read more:
9 signs you're drinking too much, even if you don't think so
6 dangerous things that can happen to your body when you drink too much
