Teenage girls are more likely to be boozers than boys

TEENAGE girls are emerging as Britain’s problem drinkers, a study suggests.

Girls in the UK are more likely to get drunk than their male counterparts – unlike almost anywhere else in the Western world.

Only girls in Canada and Sweden follow suit, but the gap between the genders was biggest in Britain.

In almost every other developed country, 15-year-old boys are inebriated more often than girls, according to researchers. Britain has twice as many female drinkers aged 15 than France, the Netherlands and Ireland, a country with similar drinking habits.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found almost a third of girls in the UK had been drunk at least twice by the age of 15 compared with a quarter of boys. In the research, seen by The Times, Denmark and Hungary were the only countries with a higher number of female underage drinkers.

The OECD study also said British women, in particular the well-educated, were increasingly becoming problem drinkers.

Of the ‘most educated’ third of British women, 20 per cent drank more than the recommended limit of 14 units per week, compared with 9 per cent of the ‘least educated’. A separate study published by the Department of Health in 2012 found teenage girls in Britain were more likely to be binge drinkers than anywhere else in Europe.

More than half of girls aged 15 and 16 said they drank to excess at least once a month.

Last year an academic study found binge drinking as a teenager can cause long-lasting damage to the brain well into adulthood.