Heavy boozing has caused a shocking spike in drunken injuries and emergency room visits in New York, a troubling new study says.

Nearly 74,000 people wound up in hospitals in 2009 for alcohol-related reasons, compared with just 22,000 in 2003 – a jump of nearly 250%, said the city Health Department study, which was released last week.

“Excessive alcohol use in general is a serious problem,” said Health Commissioner Thomas Farley. “The data suggest that the problem is getting worse.”

Hard drinkers wind up in the ER for reasons ranging from alcohol poisoning to barroom fights and drunken spills.

While the majority of alcohol-related deaths in New York – 1,537 adults in 2008 – resulted from health problems, the study said, a solid proportion were caused by accidents, suicides and homicides.

The top boozing neighborhoods, with more than 4% of their overall emergency room visits linked to alcohol, are Greenwich Village, Murray Hill and Chelsea in Manhattan; Bay Ridge and Greenpoint in Brooklyn, and the northeastern stretches of Queens.

“A lot of bars have a lot of fights,” noted John Connors, a 55-year-old transit worker slugging back Buds in Bay Ridge. “At one time there were 363 bars in this neighborhood – I know, I counted them.”

Staten Island, central Brooklyn, the northeast Bronx and the Rockaways in Queens had the lowest number of alcohol-related hospital trips.

Among adult drinkers surveyed by the Health Department, 42% acknowledge binge drinking – defined as slugging back five or more drinks in a sitting. Eleven percent describe themselves as heavy drinkers.

“On a Monday afternoon you can end up with a full bar – look at this one,” Connors said pointing to the more than 15 patrons bending elbows at Kelly’s Tavern yesterday afternoon.

“I got here at about 2 p.m. and I’ll be here until about 4 a.m.”

Health officials said the data did not explain why the emergency room figures had shot up so much. Farley noted that the general thinking was that heavy drinkers were less likely to end up in the emergency room.

“This is not normally alcoholics, but moderate drinkers who had too much to drink,” he said.

The pattern was similar for adults and underage drinkers.

For those younger than 21, the number of hospital visits shot up to 4,000 in 2009 from 1,000 in 2003, with the peaks seen in many of the same neighborhoods where adult alcohol-related visits rose according to the Nov. 14 release.

The stats were released as the State Liquor Authority successfully pressured local beverage distributors to stop selling the controversial Four Loko caffeinated alcohol brew here.

-NY PostKerry Burke and Lukas I. Alpert