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Our Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Dr Chris Davis, spoke to ABC News for a piece on how the face of risky drinking in Australia is quietly changing.

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Risky drinking among women aged 45 to 60 rose sharply between 2001 and 2019, and researchers at Macquarie University have linked it to perimenopausal anxiety that often goes unnamed. The biology is unforgiving. As progesterone falls, so does GABA, the brain's own calming signal. Alcohol stands in for it convincingly for an hour or two, then leaves the anxiety and the broken sleep worse than it found them.

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Chris also described the telescoping effect: women tend to develop dependency, and the physical harm that follows it, faster than men and at lower levels of drinking. It is a pattern that is easy to miss, because it rarely looks like the stereotype of problem drinking. If a glass of wine at five o'clock has quietly become the thing that gets you through the evening, that is worth paying attention to.

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You can read the full article on ABC News.

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