WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Drinking by American college students results in some 1,400 student deaths and 70,000 cases of sexual assault each year, a study released Tuesday says.

"Most of those alcohol-related deaths were the result of motor vehicle crashes," said Dr. Ralph Hingson, professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and lead author of the report, which was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).

More than 1,100 of the deaths were among students between the ages of 18 and 24, he said. More than a quarter of college students that age have driven in the past year while under the influence of alcohol, the study found.

Assaults represent another significant problem the nation's colleges must address, Hingson said. "Thirteen percent (of surveyed students) said they had been assaulted by another college student who'd been drinking. That projects to 633,000 people. That's more than the city of Boston, where I live -- more people than the city of Boston," he said. "Imagine the entire city of Boston being hit over the head with a baseball bat."

The study found alcohol abuse in students age 18 to 24 results in 500,000 injuries and 70,000 cases of sexual assault or date rape every year.

The study's release precedes Thursday's National Alcohol Screening Day, when 2,700 screening locations will be set up at more than 550 colleges and universities. In addition, the NIAAA will send this and related reports -- including strategies for dealing with the problem -- to every college in the country.

Abstinence on the rise, too
Those related reports show that while most college students drink moderately if at all -- with nondrinkers rising from 15 percent to 19 percent from 1993 to 1999 -- there has been an increase in so-called "binge drinking," which is characterized as more than five drinks in a row for men, four or more for women.

According to Hingson's report, incoming freshmen, males, fraternity and sorority members and athletes are the likeliest to drink. Drinking rates are lower at religious schools, commuter schools or schools that are predominately or historically African-American.  

The report recommended greater emphasis on college-community cooperation to deal with the problem. "If you walk off a college campus and there are literally hundreds of bars and clubs and retail outlets that advertise and sell drinking, do promotions, what's going to happen," asked Dr. Mark Goldman, research professor from the University of South Florida and co-chair of the Task Force on College Drinking. "We have to talk about this with even the industry, with the commercial retailers. They don't want to have these problems either."

Hingson's study is one of two dozen commissioned by the task force, put together by NIAAA's National Advisory Council to conduct a comprehensive review of research on college drinking and the effectiveness of methods to manage it.

The NIAAA Task Force recommended a variety of strategies to prevent student alcohol abuse and urges more research be done, not just to provide information to college drinkers, but also to implement concrete programs to help colleges and universities to target the problems.

While noting that research on the prevention of college drinking is lacking, the task force has developed what it calls a "3-in-1 framework" that focuses on "the student population as a whole, the college and its surrounding environment, and the individual at-risk or alcohol-dependent drinker," Goldman said. "Research strongly supports strategies that target each of these factors."

The framework is set up in around a four-tier plan that rates prevention efforts from "effective" (among them, behavior modification programs) to "ineffective" (including those programs that rely merely on providing information on the "do's" and "don'ts" of drinking).