New warning on teen tippling

Binge-boozing habit can start early, researchers find

OTTAWA — Those who binge early binge more, says a 15-year Montreal study that concludes it’s a bad idea to let teenagers get drunk at Christmas or New Year’s.

When teens start getting drunk at an earlier age, they are most likely to keep up that drinking style into their 20s, says researcher Erin O’Loughlin of Concordia University.

“This is a look at which type of individual sustains the binge drinking,” she said. “Just as a parent would never give their child a cigarette to try, the same view should perhaps apply to alcohol. Delaying that first taste of alcohol might be the best thing you can do — even if it’s New Year’s Eve.”

The study (which covers topics from smoking to exercise to drinking) began in 1999 with students as young as 12 and 13 and tracked them down again when they were 20, and again at 25.

The concept of binge drinking is still foggy for many people, O’Loughlin said.

“People will know when they’re drunk, for sure. But they don’t always know that when they have four drinks for women, that’s considered binge drinking.” (Five drinks at one sitting is officially a binge for men.)

“In our study, it showed that if you started drinking alcohol earlier ... and drank more frequently when you were younger, these habits transitioned into young adulthood and you had more of a chance of being a sustained binge drinker.

“There might be this idea that kids experiment in adolescence and their drinking declines as they grow older,” she said.

“In our study it showed that isn’t necessarily true. It showed 85 per cent of people who are binge drinking at age 20 are still binge drinking at age 25.”

The principal investigator in the work is her mother, Jennifer O’Loughlin, who teaches epidemiology at the Universite de Montreal. Erin is finishing a PhD in exercise science at Concordia.

The study, which includes researchers at the University of Massachusetts, is published in a medical journal called Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.