Background: Alcohol consumption has been constantly increasing around the world including India. Alcohol use affects individual, family, society and country in many aspects. Spouses of alcoholics suffer in all dimensions of health and are usually ignored.

Aims: The present study was designed to study the anxious status of wives of alcoholics, their socio-demographic details and alcohol use disorder among husbands; and to find out the association between these factors
with anxiety status of wives of alcoholics.

Methods: This is a hospital based cross sectional study conducted among the wives of the husbands of alcoholics attending the deaddiction centre of Department of Psychiatry at a tertiary care teaching hospital. With help of structured proforma, socio-demographic details of the subjects were collected. Anxiety status of wives and alcohol use disorder among husbands were collected using HAMA-A and AUDIT questionnaire respectively. EpiInfo and SPSS software were used for data entry and data analysis respectively. Chi-square test and Pearson’s correlation were used. Results: Most of the study subjects belong to 35-44 years of age (50%), studied up to middle school (58.8%), employed (70%), belong to lower middle SES (62.5%), Hindus (87.5%) and lived in nuclear family (81.3%). AUDIT showed 47.5% of their husbands were at very high risk for alcohol use disorder. Based on HAMA scoring tool, we found that 13.8% of the wives had severe anxiety disorder. Physical abuse, duration of alcohol consumption, and increased risk to develop alcohol disorder among husband were significant determinants of anxiety disorder among wives.

Conclusions: Identified risk factors can be used to screen the wives of alcoholic husbands to initiate intervention services like resilience development strategy along with the treatment of husbands.

Keywords: Anxiety; Alcohol Dependence; Spouses; Screening.