Alcohol’s Impact on Young People

Children aged 4–8 become increasingly knowledgeable about drinking norms in specific situations which implies that they know in what kind of situation alcohol consumption is a common human behavior. This knowledge may put them at risk for early alcohol initiation and frequent drinking later in life.

Findings suggest levels of and motivations for parental drinking, as well as exposure to a parent tipsy or drunk, all influence children’s likelihood of experiencing negative outcomes.

These findings replicate reports of reduced future orientation as a function of greater lifetime alcohol use and demonstrate an association between future orientation and white matter microstructure, in the PCR, a region containing afferent and efferent fibers connecting the cortex to the brain stem, which depends upon lifetime alcohol use.

Results highlight the need to incorporate multiple methods of sexual orientation measurement into substance use research.

Results suggest significant increased risk of condomless sex among binge drinking youth. Surprisingly, no significant difference in condom utilization was identified between non-drinkers and only moderate drinkers.

Certain social media platforms might inspire and/or attract hazardously drinking youths, contributing to the growing opportunities for social media interventions.

Alcohol is most strongly linked to violence among adolescents, so programmes for primary prevention of alcohol-related violence are best targeted towards this age group, particularly males who engage in heavy episodic drinking.

This review suggests that externalizing behaviour is a strong predictor of AUD. The risk of AUD is also high when illicit drug use co-occurs with externalizing behaviour. Environmental factors were influential but changed over time.More evidence is needed to assess the roles of early internalizing behaviour, early drinking onset and other distinctive factors on the development of AUD in young adulthood

We found that experiences of social harms from drinking at 30 years differ depending on the drinker’s gender and context. Our findings suggest that risky contexts and associated harms are still significant among 30-year-old adults, indicating that a range of gender-specific drinking contexts should be represented in harm reduction campaigns. The current findings also highlight the need to consider gender to inform context-based harm reduction measures and to widen the age target for these beyond emerging adults.

This exploratory study aims to model the impact of sex and age on the percentage of pre-drinking in 27 countries, presenting a single model of pre-drinking behaviour for all countries and then comparing the role of sex and age on pre-drinking behaviour between countries. Using data from the Global Drug Survey, the percentages of pre-drinkers were estimated for 27 countries from 64,485 respondents. Bivariate and multivariate multilevel models were used to investigate and compare the percentage of pre-drinking by sex (male and female) and age (16–35 years) between countries.

This is the first study to show that alcohol withdrawal-associated muscle hyperalgesia may occur in healthy episodic binge drinkers with only 2–3 years of drinking history, and epinephrine may play a role in binge drinking-associated hyperalgesia.