Only a small percentage of Americans with addiction problems get treatment, and the problem of treatment access is especially acute for blacks and Hispanics, HealthDay News reported Jan. 5.

The study found that Hispanics have higher rates of alcohol problems than blacks or whites, but that Hispanics and blacks who had severe alcohol problems were less likely than whites to get treatment.

"We found some evidence that financial and logistical problems -- such as not knowing how to find services, lacking means to pay and being unable to obtain child care -- have kept Hispanics from seeking help for an alcohol problem when they had considered going," said lead researcher Laura Schmidt of the University of California at San Francisco's School of Medicine.

Schmidt said that experts have long argued over whether minorities had even greater problems accessing treatment than the population at large. "Once we began teasing apart the underlying relationship between factors that affect treatment use, significant ethnic differences began to emerge," Schmidt said.

The study appears in the January 2007 issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.