Binge drinking is blamed for the deaths of three college students around the country in the last three months. But, as this ScienCentral News video reports, new research shows that young drinkers who avoid such tragedies are still risking their long-term health.
"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." Some parents think that a couple of drinks won't harm their kids, but often teens don't stop at just a couple. "A lot of young people drink as much as they can and as quickly as they can," White says.
What they don't tell you in school
As part of the ongoing Seattle Social Development Project, sociologist Sabrina Oesterle and her colleagues at 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.
image: ABC News
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," Oesterle explains. "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."
Addiction specialist Dr. Nicholas Pace, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at New York UniversitySchool of Medicine and co-author of the book "Teens Under the Influence," is not surprised by Oesterle's results. "What this study shows here is pretty much what we see in real life," he says. "It goes right along with what we know alcohol can do to the liver and to the brain and to the various organs."
However, the study still hasn't proved whether these health issues are a direct result of adolescent bingeing. 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.
Meanwhile, 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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