Adolescents particularly susceptible to drinking habits of romantic partner's friends

 The drinking habits of a romantic partner's friends are more likely to impact an adolescent's future drinking than are the behaviors of an adolescent's own friends or significant other, according to a new study in the October issue of the American Sociological Review.

"Dating someone whose friends are big drinkers is more likely to cause an adolescent to engage in dangerous drinking behaviors than are the drinking habits of the adolescent's own friends or romantic partner," said Derek Kreager, lead author of the study and an associate professor of crime, law, and justice at Pennsylvania State University. "This applies to both binge drinking and drinking frequency."

For example, the study found that the odds of an adolescent binge drinking if his or her partner's friends engage in heavy drinking is more than twice as high as the likelihood of an adolescent binge drinking if his or her friends or significant other drink heavily.

"The friends of a partner are likely to be very different from the adolescent and his or her friends and they might also be, at least a little, different from the partner," said Kreager, who coauthored the study with Dana A. Haynie, a sociology professor at Ohio State University. "Adolescents are motivated to be more like their partner's friends in an effort to strengthen their relationship with their partner."

Of course, the influence of a significant other's friends on an adolescent's drinking habits is not always negative. "If an adolescent is a drinker and he or she starts going out with someone whose friends predominately don't drink, you would find the same effect but in the opposite direction," Kreager said.

Relying on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a survey of U.S. adolescents enrolled in grades 7 through 12 in the 1994-1995 school year, the Kreager/Haynie study considers responses from 449 couples (898 students) in 1994, when they hadn't necessarily gotten together yet, and in 1996, after they had become a couple. Kreager and Haynie focus on heterosexual couples who were students during both waves of the survey.

In their study, the authors also found that before getting together, adolescent dating partners share few of the same friends and that an adolescent's friends are likely to be the same gender as he or she. "Couples often come from different friendship groups," said Kreager.

These results support the idea that the peer contexts of dating expose adolescents to new opportunities and norms that influence their own drinking behavior, while also increasing opposite-gender friendship ties and expanding early adolescent mixed-gender peer groups, according to the authors.

Still, Kreager said, it's important to note that although the drinking habits of a romantic partner's friends are more likely to impact an adolescent's future drinking than are the behaviors of an adolescent's own friends or significant other, the adolescent's friends and partner are likely to be influential nonetheless.

Interestingly, the research indicates limited gender differences in observed associations. "Consistent with prior literature, our findings indicate that girls are significantly less likely than their male partners to binge drink," Kreager said. "However, we find that connections with drinking friends, romantic partners, and friends-of partners have similar positive associations with the drinking habits of boys and girls. Moreover, our research suggests that, if anything, males are more susceptible to a significant other's influence than are girls."

In terms of policy implications, Kreager said, "The study demonstrates the need for educators and policymakers to more closely examine dating and the people dating puts adolescents in contact with when they consider interventions to address drinking behaviors, attitudes, and opportunities."


Journal Reference:

  1. D. A. Kreager, D. L. Haynie. Dangerous Liaisons? Dating and Drinking Diffusion in Adolescent Peer Networks. American Sociological Review, 2011; 76 (5): 737 DOI: 10.1177/0003122411416934

Alcohol consumption guidelines inadequate for cancer prevention, analysis finds

Current alcohol consumption guidelines are inadequate for the prevention of cancer and new international guidelines are needed, states an analysis in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

Guidelines in some countries are not currently based on evidence for long-term harm. Most guidelines are based on studies that assessed the short-term effects of alcohol, such as social and psychological issues and hospital admissions, and were not designed to prevent chronic diseases. As well, in some countries, alcohol producers were either part of working groups defining sensible drinking or instrumental in dissemination of the guidelines.

There is increasing evidence that links alcohol consumption to cancer. The WHO International Agency of Research on Cancer has stated, based on evidence, that alcohol is carcinogenic in both animals and humans. Several evaluations of this agency as well the joint 2007 report of the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research warned of the link between alcohol and cancers in the mouth, throat, esophagus, liver, colon-rectum and breast cancers. Based on the evidence, "there is no level of alcohol consumption for which cancer risk is null."

"On the whole, alcohol is considered an avoidable risk factor for cancer incidence and, more generally, for the global burden of disease," writes Dr. Paule Latino-Martel, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), with coauthors from the French Institute for Prevention and Health Education (INPES) and the French National Cancer Institute (INCa).

"Although drinking guidelines used in the context of a brief intervention have proven effective" to help people who have problems due to their drinking habits to reduce their alcohol consumption, they are inadequate to prevent all types of risks including cancer risk. Therefore, "their application to the general population should be revisited," write the authors.

Canadian guidelines for "low-risk" consumption, set in 1997 at 9 drinks per week for women and 14 per week for men, may be modified when Canada releases its first national guidelines later in 2011.

"Although guidelines are currently practical for health professionals and health authorities, the time has come to reconsider them using a scientific basis independent of any cultural and economic considerations and to discuss the eventuality of abandoning them," conclude the authors. "Considering our current knowledge of the relationship between alcohol consumption and cancer risk, national health authorities should be aware of the possible legal consequences of promoting drinking guidelines that allow consumers to believe that drinking at low or moderate levels is without risk."


Journal Reference:

  1. Paule Latino-Martel, Pierre Arwidson, Raphaëlle Ancellin, Nathalie Druesne-Pecollo, Serge Hercberg, Martine Le Quellec-Nathan, Thanh Le-Luong, Dominique Maraninchi. Alcohol consumption and cancer risk: revisiting guidelines for sensible drinking. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 2011; DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.110363

Rose-colored beer goggles: Some drinkers believe social benefits of heavy drinking outweigh harms

 A study by University of Washington psychologists shows some people continue to drink heavily because of perceived positive effects, despite experiencing negative effects such as hangovers, fights and regrettable sexual situations.

According to participants in the study, boosts of courage, chattiness and other social benefits of drinking outweigh its harms, which they generally did not consider as strong deterrents.

The findings offer a new direction for programs targeting binge drinking, which tend to limit their focus to avoiding alcohol's ill effects rather than considering its rewards.

"This study suggest why some people can experience a lot of bad consequences of drinking but not change their behavior," said Kevin King, co-author and UW assistant professor of psychology.

"People think, 'It's not going to happen to me' or 'I'll never drink that much again.' They do not seem to associate their own heavy drinking with negative consequences," he said.

The paper was published online May 30 in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.

Nearly 500 college students completed an online survey measuring their drinking habits during the previous year. The survey assessed how often the participants had experienced 35 different negative consequences of drinking, such as blackouts, fights, hangovers, missed classes and work, and lost or stolen belongings, as well as 14 positive effects of drinking, including better conversational and joke-telling abilities, improved sexual encounters and more energy to stay up late partying and dancing.

The researchers also measured the participants' beliefs about how likely all of these drinking consequences would happen again and how positive or negative they were.

Participants rated the upsides to drinking as more positive and likely to happen in the future, a finding the researchers call "rose-colored beer goggles."

"It's as though they think that the good effects of drinking keep getting better and more likely to happen again," said Diane Logan, lead author and a UW clinical psychology graduate student.

Respondents' perceptions of drinking's negative consequences differed according to how many bad experiences they had had. Those who experienced a small to moderate number of ill effects of drinking did not consider the experiences to be not so bad and did not think that they were any more likely to experience them again compared with students who hadn't experienced them.

The researchers call this cognitive-dissonance reasoning. It leads to people, on the morning after a night of heavy partying, telling themselves "I'll never drink that much again" or "I threw up that one time, but that's not me; I won't do it again." Or, it may be that once a bad consequence of drinking happens, people think that it wasn't really as bad as they initially thought, the researchers speculated.

But the participants reporting the most bad experiences rated the episodes as more negative and more likely to happen again. "Until high levels of negative consequences are experienced, participants aren't deterred by the ill effects of drinking," Logan said.

The findings have implications for alcohol intervention programs for college students, which tend to focus on how to avoid the negative consequences of drinking. "We should take into account how people don't think of negative consequences as all that bad or likely to happen again," Logan said, adding that factoring in how people view alcohol's positive effects "might have a bigger impact" on drinking habits.

She suggests a risk reduction approach by helping people reduce their drinking such that they still get some of the positive effects while avoiding many of the negative and recommends training exercises to increase social skills in the absence of alcohol.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism funded the study. Co-authors are Teague Henry, a UW psychology undergraduate student; Matthew Vaughn, a former UW psychology undergraduate student; and Jeremy Luk, a UW psychology graduate student.


Journal Reference:

  1. Diane E. Logan, Teague Henry, Matthew Vaughn, Jeremy W. Luk, Kevin M. King. Rose-colored beer goggles: The relation between experiencing alcohol consequences and perceived likelihood and valence.. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 2011; DOI: 10.1037/a0024126

Caffeinated fruity alcoholic beverages blamed for spike in alcohol-related hospitalizations

The popular, formerly caffeinated, fruity alcoholic beverage, Four Loko, has been blamed for a spike in alcohol-related hospitalizations, especially throughout college campuses.

Initially, caffeine was deemed the culprit and the Food and Drug Administration ordered all traces of caffeine to be removed from Four Loko and all other similar beverages. However, according to an upcoming evaluation in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, caffeine might not be the primary cause of the spike in hospitalizations.

"Four Loko didn't have the extraordinary intoxicating effect because of caffeine, but rather because of the phenomenon of situational specificity of tolerance," says Shepard Siegel of McMaster University, who wrote the article to highlight the importance of unusual cues related to alcohol tolerance.

The situational specificity of tolerance implies that alcohol will have a greater effect if administered in the presence of unusual cues, rather than in familiar settings typically associated with the drug. It has been known, at least since the time of Ivan Pavlov that our bodies prepare for food when it is time to eat, or when we smell the food cooking, or when other stimuli signal that we will soon be presented with a meal. More recently, it has also been determined that we similarly prepare for a drug.

We have experienced many pairings of certain flavors (e.g., beer, wine) with the effects of alcohol. If we now experience alcohol in the presence of a novel flavor, such as an ersatz fruit flavor, we end up experiencing a heightened alcohol effect. This is because we have not associated such unusual flavors with the effects of alcohol and therefore do not make any preparatory response to lessen the drug effect.

According to Siegel, previous studies have clearly demonstrated situational specificity of tolerance to alcohol in university students. For example, in one experiment, participants were divided into groups where one was given alcohol in a familiar context — beer in a bar and the second group was given the same amount of alcohol in an unusual context — mixed with sweetened carbonated water in an office. The unusual context group became more intoxicated than the usual context group.

If someone were to continually consume a particular flavor mixed with alcohol, they would eventually form a strong association between that flavor and the effects of alcohol. This would cause the person to build a tolerance and the beverage would no longer be exceptionally intoxicating. Says Siegel, "Four Loko's fruit flavor hasn't been previously paired with alcohol, and because that association between flavor and alcohol hasn't been made, greater intoxication may occur."

In a recent press release, the manufacturer of Four Loko, Phusion Projects, announced a new version of their drink, Four Loko XXX Limited Edition. According to that press release, "The innovative product will feature a brand new Four Loko flavor profile every four months." It is possible that changing the flavors of Four Loko might cause a person to be unable to form an association or tolerance, which increases its intoxication effect.

Alcohol, mood and me (not you)

Thanks in part to studies that follow subjects for a long time, psychologists are learning more about differences between people. In a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the author describes how psychologists can use their data to learn about the different ways that people's minds work.

Most psychology research is done by asking a big group of people the same questions at the same time. "So we might get a bunch of Psych 101 undergrads, administer a survey, ask about how much they use alcohol and what their mood is, and just look and see, is there a relationship between those two variables," says Daniel J. Bauer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the author of the article.

But a one-time survey of a bunch of college students can only get you so far. For example, it might find that sad people drink more, but it can't tell us whether people drink more at times when they are unhappy, whether the consequences of drinking instead result in a depressed mood, or whether the relationship between mood and alcohol use is stronger for some people than others.

One way psychologists have used to learn more about people is collecting data from people over a longer time period. For example, they might give each subject an electronic device to record blood pressure and stress several times a day, or ask them to log on to a website every night to answer a survey. In one case, Bauer's colleague, Andrea Hussong, asked adolescents to complete daily diaries with ratings of their mood and alcohol use over 21 days. The data showed that the relationship between mood and alcohol use is not the same for everyone. Adolescents with behavioral problems drink more in general, irrespective of mood, but only adolescents without behavioral problems drink more often when feeling depressed.

Analyzing this kind of data requires tougher math than the simple survey data, which is where quantitative psychologists like Bauer come in. "I think even though a lot of researchers are starting to collect this data, I don't think they've taken full advantage of it," he says. In the new paper, Bauer points to other methods that can do a better job of showing how variables relate differently for different people.

The point of all of this is to help people, Bauer says. For example, if psychologists discover that certain kinds of people are more likely to drink when depressed, it would be possible to help those people early. "Ultimately, the idea would be to identify people who might be more at risk and try to help them," he says.


Journal Reference:

  1. Daniel J. Bauer. Evaluating Individual Differences in Psychological Processes. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2011

Adult-supervised drinking in young teens may lead to more alcohol use, consequences

— Allowing adolescents to drink alcohol under adult supervision does not appear to teach responsible drinking as teens get older. In fact, such a "harm-minimization" approach may actually lead to more drinking and alcohol-related consequences, according to a new study in the May 2011 issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

"Kids need parents to be parents and not drinking buddies," according to the study's lead researcher, Barbara J. McMorris, Ph.D., of the School of Nursing at the University of Minnesota. Allowing adolescents to drink with adults present but not when unsupervised may send mixed signals. "Adults need to be clear about what messages they are sending."

In general, parents tend to take one of two approaches toward teen drinking. Some allow their adolescent children to consume alcohol in small amounts on occasion if an adult is present. The thinking is that teens will learn to drink responsibly if introduced to alcohol slowly in a controlled environment. This has been the predominant approach in many countries, including Australia.

A second approach is one of "zero tolerance" for youth drinking, meaning that teens should not be allowed to drink alcohol under any circumstances. This less permissive position is predominant in the United States, with local laws and national policies often advocating total abstinence for adolescents.

To test how these different approaches are related to teen drinking, McMorris and colleagues from the Centre for Adolescent Health in Melbourne, Australia, and the Social Development Research Group in Seattle surveyed more than 1,900 seventh graders. About half were from Victoria, Australia; the rest were from Washington State. From seventh to ninth grade, investigators asked the youths about such factors as alcohol use, problems they had as a result of alcohol consumption, and how often had they consumed alcohol with an adult present.

By eighth grade, about 67% of Victorian youths had consumed alcohol with an adult present, as did 35% of those in Washington State, reflecting general cultural attitudes. In ninth grade, 36% of Australian teens compared with 21% of American teens had experienced alcohol-related consequences, such as not being able to stop drinking, getting into fights, or having blackouts. However, regardless of whether they were from Australia or the United States, youths who were allowed to drink with an adult present had increased levels of alcohol use and were more likely to have experienced harmful consequences by the ninth grade.

The researchers suggest that allowing adolescents to drink with adults present may act to encourage alcohol consumption. According to the authors, their results suggest that parents adopt a "no-use" policy for young adolescents. "Kids need black and white messages early on," says McMorris. "Such messages will help reinforce limits as teens get older and opportunities to drink increase."

In a related study in the May issue of JSAD, researchers from The Netherlands found that, among 500 12- to -15-year olds, the only parenting factor related to adolescent drinking was the amount of alcohol available in the home. In fact, the amount of alcohol parents themselves drank was not a factor in adolescent drinking. These results suggest that parents should only keep alcohol where it is inaccessible to teens. In addition, parents should "set strict rules regarding alcohol use, particularly when a total absence of alcoholic drinks at home is not feasible," according to lead researcher Regina van den Eijnden, Ph.D., of Utrecht University in The Netherlands.

"Both studies show that parents matter," McMorris concludes. "Despite the fact that peers and friends become important influences as adolescents get older, parents still have a big impact."

The study by McMorris and colleagues was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The research by van den Eijnden and colleagues was funded by The Netherlands Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.


Journal References:

  1. McMorris, B. J., Catalano, R. F., Kim, M. J., Toumbourou, J. W., & Hemphill, S. A. Influence of Family Factors and Supervised Alcohol Use on Adolescent Alcohol Use and Harms: Similarities Between Youth in Different Alcohol Policy Contexts. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 72(3), 418-428 [link]
  2. van den Eijnden, R., van de Mheen, D., Vet, R., & Vermulst, A. Alcohol-Specific Parenting and Adolescents' Alcohol-Related Problems: The Interacting Role of Alcohol Availability at Home and Parental Rules. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 72(3), 408-417 [link]

Sober light cast on Russia's mortality crisis

 With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians were faced with more than the demise of a political system. Working-age men began dying in droves, and the country saw a 40 percent surge in deaths between 1990 and 1994.

The killer was often alcohol — that much was clear. And for years, many economists and political scientists have blamed Russia's lurch toward democracy and capitalism for driving those men to drink. They reasoned that privatization left many people unskilled and unemployable, ushering in a sense of listlessness and depression that mixed too easily with cheap vodka.

But Stanford researchers have dug up evidence that helps get democracy and capitalism off the hook and points to a new culprit: the end of an anti-alcohol campaign that contributed to a plunge in mortality rates during its short life in the Gorbachev era.

"Most things that kill people disproportionately kill babies and the elderly," said Grant Miller, an assistant professor of medicine and faculty member of the Center for Health Policy. "But working-age men accounted for the largest spike in deaths in the early 1990s. Many people suspect that's somehow entwined with political and economic transition, but there's a lot more to it than that."

Most of the deaths during Russia's mortality crisis were from alcohol poisoning, drunken violence or slower killers like heart attacks and strokes, he said.

Miller has outlined the findings — based on newly compiled and digitized archival data — in a working paper written in collaboration with associate professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya and Christina Gathmann, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Mannheim in Germany. Their research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health through Stanford's Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

Their study shows a steady rise in the number of deaths between the early 1960s and 1984 in one of the world's heaviest drinking countries. Recognizing that alcoholism was a major cause of death and low work productivity, Mikhail Gorbachev instituted an aggressive anti-alcohol campaign in 1985, shortly after he became the Soviet Union's secretary general.

New regulations slashed official alcohol sales by two-thirds, drove up prices by as much as 50 percent and prohibited stores from selling booze before 2 p.m. on business days. Showing up drunk at work or on the streets could cost Russians a hefty fine or land them in prison.

"It was common practice for workers to take their breaks, go to a liquor store and come back to work drunk," said Bhattacharya, who is also a Stanford Center for Health Policy faculty member. "So the people behind the campaign thought closing the stores during the day could lead to more productivity and fewer work-related deaths and injuries."

But the campaign also emphasized alternatives to drinking. A national temperance society was formed, propaganda promoted sobriety and administrators in all Soviet districts — called oblasts — were required to build more parks and sports clubs to encourage family-friendly fun.

The campaign worked. The number of deaths plummeted in 1985 and remained below the pre-campaign trend throughout the late 1980s. That translated to a 12 percent decline in mortality rates: about 665,000 fewer deaths. But by the early 1990s, shortly after the campaign was dropped — and at the same time that the Soviet Union crumbled — the number of deaths began to climb.

The temperance campaign officially folded in 1988 for two main reasons: It was wildly unpopular and the government realized it was losing too much money from low alcohol sales. By 1991, consumption was back to pre-campaign levels.

And Russia's heaviest drinkers — working-age men — fell off the wagon and got back to dying at alarming rates. The end of the campaign accounts for as much as half of Russia's four-year mortality crisis, Miller and Bhattacharya said.

"Welfare and health are not exactly the same thing," Miller said. "You can restrict people's choices in a way that improves health, but that doesn't unambiguously mean that people are better off. "

Alcohol abuse history influences quality of life following liver transplant

— A history of alcohol abuse significantly impacts quality of life for patients after liver transplant, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital.

"Transplant recipients with alcoholic cirrhosis experienced less improvement in physical quality of life and reported greater pain and physical limitations than non-alcoholics after transplant surgery," says Anne Eshelman, Ph.D., Henry Ford Behavioral Health Services, lead author of the study.

"Understanding alcoholic and nonalcoholic patients' post-transplant change in quality of life may assist in treatment planning. Our results suggest that better interventions to improve pain tolerance, mobilize support, and help patients rebuild their lives after transplantation may improve quality of life in this high-risk population."

Study results were published in the most recent issue of Transplant Proceedings.

A sample of 65 end-stage liver disease patients were surveyed before and after liver transplantation for physical and mental health quality of life using the SF-36 Physical Health Summary and Mental Health Summary. Baseline data was collected prior to transplant and follow-up data was collected at one and six months after transplantation.

Results indicate physical quality of life did not improve significantly between one- and six-month follow-up for patients with alcohol abuse history.

By contrast, mental health quality improved significantly between baseline and one-month follow-up, but not between one- and six-month follow-up. No significant differences were found on the Mental Health Summary index based on alcohol abuse history for either time period.

"For liver transplant patients, improvements in psychosocial functioning and quality of life precede improvements in physical quality of life. We found that weakened physical quality of life improvements for patients with alcohol abuse histories are related to greater pain and physical deficits," explains Dr. Eshelman.

"Some alcoholics may have lower pain thresholds and may have used substances for self-medication for both physical and emotional pain, and post-transplant, they may have less effective coping strategies to manage pain."

According to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, more than 6,000 people undergo transplant surgery each year and there are nearly 17,000 people currently waiting for liver transplant.

The study was funded by Henry Ford Hospital.

Genetic makeup and duration of abuse reduce the brain's neurons in drug addiction

A study conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory demonstrated that drug addicted individuals who have a certain genetic makeup have lower gray matter density — and therefore fewer neurons — in areas of the brain that are essential for decision-making, self-control, and learning and memory.

Nelly Alia-Klein, a study coauthor who is a Brookhaven Lab medical scientist, said, "This research shows that genes can influence the severity of addiction. The results suggest that addicted individuals with low MAOA [monoamine oxidase A] genotype may need a different kind of treatment than other addicted individuals who carry the high MAOA genotype. More studies need to be conducted before implementing changes in treatment strategies. However, addiction treatment professionals and others who manage addicted individuals, such as probation officers and judges, should be informed of these and other new findings in the neurobiology of drug addiction."

The research, conducted by scientists from Brookhaven Lab, Stony Brook University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is reported in the March 7, 2011 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

This and previous studies have shown that cocaine-addicted individuals, relative to non-addicted individuals, have lower gray matter density in frontal parts of the brain — which is important for paying attention and organizing one's own behavior — and in the hippocampus, a brain region important for learning and memory. The current study found that cocaine-addicted individuals with a low MAOA genotype had lower gray matter density in the brain's orbitofrontal cortex than addicted individuals with a high MAOA genotype or non-addicted individuals. MAOA is an enzyme that regulates neurotransmitters in the brain, such as serotonin and dopamine, which control mood and behavior.

In addition, the current study found that the pattern of low gray matter was correlated with the number of years of alcohol, cocaine and cigarette use in the addicted group. The longer cocaine, alcohol, and cigarettes were abused, the lower gray matter was found in the hippocampus and frontal regions of the brain. This result means that curtailing drug use may be protective against such brain changes.

The scientists recruited 82 men — 40 addicted to cocaine and 42 controls — for the study using advertisements in local newspapers and from local treatment centers. All the participants provided informed consent in accordance with the local institutional review board. They were given physical/neurological, psychiatric and neuropsychological examinations, including tests of intellectual functioning, and the researchers determined that all the men were healthy and not taking medication.

To determine the genotype of each participant, the scientists took DNA samples and analyzed them for the presence of high or low MAOA. The researchers also scanned the subjects' brains using magnetic resonance imaging, and a method called voxel-based morphometry enabled the researchers to determine the proportion/density of gray matter (as an estimation of neuron density) in the whole brain. The gray matter volume was then compared between the groups and correlated with genetic type and duration of drug use.

"Only males were part of this study and therefore it is important for future studies to examine these genetic and brain effects in females as well," Klein explained. "Also, further studies will have to be done to track these gene-brain-behavior patterns throughout a lifespan that influence the volume of the brain's neurons."

The National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and the National Association for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression supported this research using infrastructure supported at Brookhaven Lab by the DOE Office of Science.


Journal Reference:

  1. N. Alia-Klein, M. A. Parvaz, P. A. Woicik, A. B. Konova, T. Maloney, E. Shumay, R. Wang, F. Telang, A. Biegon, G.-J. Wang, J. S. Fowler, D. Tomasi, N. D. Volkow, R. Z. Goldstein. Gene x Disease Interaction on Orbitofrontal Gray Matter in Cocaine Addiction. Archives of General Psychiatry, 2011; 68 (3): 283 DOI: 10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.10

Parents important for keeping adolescents off alcohol

Parents who are both present and engaged are the very best way of preventing teenagers from consuming large quantities of alcohol. Adolescents who smoke, stay out with their friends and have access to alcohol — from their parents, for example — when they are as young as 13 are at greater risk of becoming binge drinkers in their late teens, reveals a new thesis from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

"Initiatives that focus on strengthening the parent-child relationship and limiting parental provision of alcohol can prove effective in limiting risky consumption among adolescents," says Anna-Karin Danielsson from the Department of Public Health Sciences. "Parents also play an important role when it comes to teaching young people how to resist peer pressure to drink."

In her thesis, Danielsson monitored 1,200 pupils from the age of 13 to the age of 19 between 2001 and 2006, and investigated which factors can reduce the risk of high alcohol consumption (protective factors) and which constitute risk factors. The results show that adolescents exhibiting risky behaviour in their early teens need help quickly as they are at greater risk of high consumption in the future, and of associated problems with their health, school, parents and friends, for example. This is where parental input can make all the difference.

"But boys and girls are slightly different," says Anna-Karin Danielsson. "The risk of high alcohol consumption among boys who smoke and who have friends who drink is considerably reduced when parents keep an eye on what teenagers get up to, and with whom. Whereas girls in the risk zone benefit most from an emotionally stable and close parent-child relationship in terms of protective effect."

The thesis also examines alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems among youngsters in 23 European countries. It is clear that the Nordic countries and the UK differ from the other European countries in that it is as common for girls to drink large quantities of alcohol in one session as it is for boys. In other countries, boys report higher alcohol consumption and more alcohol-related problems than girls.

"16-year-old girls in the Nordic countries and the UK binge drink to the same extent as boys, in other words at least five consecutive drinks in one go," says Anna-Karin Danielsson. "We're also seeing a strong correlation between this and problems such as fights, accidents and unwanted sexual relationships."

Dr Danielsson believes that the fact that most reported problems originate with the broad majority of alcohol consumers rather than with the heaviest drinkers amongst adolescents speaks in favour of preventive measures being directed at youngsters in general in the first instance.

"At the same time, it's important to develop prevention strategies that target adolescents with the highest consumption and the most problems," she says. "Adolescents, who for various reasons do not have the full support of their parents, must not be forgotten."

Doctoral thesis: Adolescent alcohol use: Implications for prevention, Anna-Karin Danielsson, Department of Public Health Sciences, ISBN: 978-91-7457-205-6. The thesis was funded through grants from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research and was successfully defended on 25 February 2011.