Alcohol consumption and awareness of its link to dementia development among adults in Uganda: a qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Alcohol use has a significant mental health impact and is a known modifiable risk factor for dementia. In Uganda, where alcohol consumption rates are high, awareness of its link to dementia remains poorly understood. This study explored the understanding of this relationship among adults in Uganda using the Health Belief Model (HBM). Methods: We conducted a qualitative descriptive study among 20 adults aged 18 and older, purposively selected from Lira and Isingiro districts in Northern and Southwestern Uganda. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed using HBM constructs. Results: Five themes emerged: (1) Perceived susceptibility and severity; some participants recognized that high alcohol intake could lead to memory loss and cognitive decline, though many believed dementia was simply part of ageing; (2) Perceived barriers including peer influence, health myths, habitual use, and easy access to alcohol; (3) Perceived benefits; few believed that awareness of the alcohol-dementia link could motivate behavior change; (4) Self-efficacy; some found it difficult to regulate drinking despite recognizing risks; and (5) Cues to action; suggestions included public sensitization and alcohol policy enforcement. Conclusion: Awareness of alcohol's role in dementia development was limited, and ageing was commonly misperceived as the sole cause of cognitive decline. Misconceptions about alcohol's health benefits perpetuated its use. Interventions should emphasize education on alcohol's cognitive effects and promote dementia risk reduction strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".