A study conducted in the city of Newcastle, UK, has revealed what you always suspected. Over two-thirds of emergency room visits on weekends, especially in the wee hours of the morning, are directly related to alcohol consumption.

Newcastle University health researcher Kathryn Parkinson and her colleagues examined health records from a local inner-city hospital over the 2010-11 year, looking for statistics on how many people were admitted for alcohol-related issues. Then they conducted breathalizer tests of people admitted to the same ER during 2012-13.

In an analysis of the data, the researchers uncovered several telling patterns. Though overall alcohol-related visits to the ER hovered around 15.2 percent in 2012-13, the numbers jumped dramatically on weekends, rising to 70 percent. The majority of those were young men, arriving in the late night or early morning—and most of them came from outside the city. "Traumatic injury was the most common reason for attendance [at the hospital]," Parkinson and her colleagues write in a paper published yesterday in Emergency Medicine Journal. But "psychiatric problems" were a close second.

Parkinson and her colleagues suggest that hospitals could ease the burden on workers by beefing up staff during weekend binge drinking hours. Psychiatric staff could offer brief interventions, helping people who are struggling with alcoholism and depression. In the long run, these interventions could save money. Right now, treatment for alcohol-related problems in the ER costs the hospital where the research took place roughly £1 million per year (nearly $1.5 million).

Musgrove Park Hospital emergency care consultant Clifford Mann says the main problem is that alcohol is too widely available and too cheap. "The absurdity of retail alcohol prices must be addressed," he argues in an op-ed. "There are few more obvious economic principles than the link between price and volume sales." He suggests one remedy would be to set minimum unit prices on booze. Like Parkinson and her colleagues, he also recommends "short personalized interventions" for people who show up at the ER with alcohol-related maladies.

Ultimately, this study confirms that cities experience predictable patterns of people drinking to excess—and getting injured as a result. The question that remains is whether hospitals and policymakers will do anything about it.

Emergency Medicine Journal, 2015. DOI:10.1136/emermed-2014-204581 (About DOIs).