There may be a new reason for concern about underage drinking. As this ScienCentral News video reports, starting to drink at a young age could have long-term health consequences.
"What has happened in recent years is there's been a split," explains Aaron White, an alcohol researcher in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University Medical Center. "There's been an increase in sort of a heavy, repeated binge-type drinking and also an increase in abstention. Most adults when they drink, they drink slowly, they have a few glasses of wine at dinner or beer at the football game or something like that, whereas a lot of young people drink as much as they can and as quickly as they can."
As part of the ongoing Seattle Social Development Project, sociologist Sabrina Oesterle and her colleagues at the Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington in Seattle looked at the long-term health effects of adolescent binge drinking. "We already know that binge drinking in adolescence has immediate health consequences for teenagers," says Oesterle. "So we were especially interested whether drinking, especially heavy drinking in adolescence, has long-term health consequences that we could see in young adulthood."
Conducting a series of interviews on alcohol, tobacco and drug use, the study followed more than 800 children in 18 elementary schools from the 5th grade through to the age of 24. Oesterle defined bingeing, or heavy episodic drinking, as five or more alcoholic drinks on one occasion in a month. "Our findings show that a history of binge drinking in adolescence has long-term health outcomes in young adulthood at age 24," she says.
The study identified four distinct drinking patterns amongst the kids. The majority, about 70 percent of the group, rarely or never binge-drank; these kids had the best health outcomes at the end of the study. At the other end of the scale, including only three percent of all the kids involved, were the "chronic bingers," who started early on in adolescence at age 13. "According to their self-report, they binge-drank several times a month and they continued to do so throughout adolescence," Oesterle explains. "The chronic binge drinkers had the worst health outcomes at age 24, and we found specifically that they were almost four times as likely to be overweight or obese as compared to the non-binge drinkers, and they were three and a half times as likely to have hypertension."
Between the extremes of non-drinkers and chronic bingers fell the "escalators." who started binge drinking in mid-adolescence— around the age 15— "but very quickly or very rapidly increased the frequency of binge drinking until they were age 18," and the "late-onsetters," who started drinking a little bit later, around the age 16 or later and increased from there on. Oesterle found that late-onsetters were about 50 percent more likely than non-drinkers to engage in unsafe driving behavior such as driving drunk, driving with others under the influence of drugs or alcohol or not using a seatbelt. This group was also more likely to have been ill in the past year with serious conditions like asthma, diabetes and cancer.
The most unexpected result came from the escalator group. "We did not see any major health differences for them at age 24," says Oesterle. "We are thinking it might be interesting to follow these young people up a little bit longer and we are expecting that maybe more chronic outcomes for them might show up a little bit later."
Psychiatry professor Yifrah Kaminer at the Alcohol Research Center at the University of Connecticut Health Center thinks Oesterle's is an important study. "Heavy episodic drinking is very problematic, the earlier you start the worse are the results," he says. "Unfortunately it's very common in adolescence and even more in young adulthood at college age, which is a major problem." But, he says the study doesn't prove whether these health issues are a direct result of adolescent bingeing.
While figuring that out will take further studies, Oesterle plans to continue her research until the group turns 33, as well as looking into social, behavioral effects of starting to drink heavily at such a young age. "There's definitely a need to remember that alcohol abuse and alcohol dependency is a major issue," Kaminer says.
The NIAAA says that the level of underage drinking has remained constant, but disturbingly high, over the last decade. Oesterle believes that starting any kind of prevention early on in elementary school may be the key, "but at the same time it seems important to continue any kind of prevention work throughout the school years and into high school."
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