Background: Five years have elapsed in February 2014 since the new road traffic law was enforced in the Slovak Republic (SR). It brought about not only many legislative changes, but apparently was also largely effective in the reduction of road traffic accident rate. Nevertheless, accidents due to alcohol seem to represent a group that was positively influenced to a lesser extent. The goal of this paper is to bring the readers into acquaintance with current knowledge on road traffic accident (RTA) risk due to alcohol use. Methods: This is a theoretical survey, a non-systematic review, structured in the form of answers on four questions exploring: 1) the risk of RTA due to use of alcohol in general; 2) the level of risk in the SR; 3) other risk factors; 4) share of alcohol-associated RTA on total alcohol-related mortality. Results: The relationship between the dose of alcohol and the risk of accident is exponential. The use of alcohol is associated with more than a 20-fold increase of total relative risk of RTA in the SR. Alcohol is one of the most important (preventable) factors of RTAs, qualitatively comparable to vehicle speed. In the past five years, 28 people, on average, have died each year in accidents caused by alcohol, which represents 9.2 % of total number of deaths on roads. Conclusion: Alcohol is one of major risk factors of road traffic accidents.Deaths following road traffic accidents due to alcohol represent a typical example of alcohol-related harm due to external causes in the literature. A detailed analysis on the topic is missing however in the SR (comparison with the Czech Republic is already prepared for the next paper).

Key words: alcohol – road traffic accidents – relative risk – alcohol-related harm