Early alcohol use leads to abuse

By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the September 6, 2007 edition

Researcher finds that exposure to alcohol in middle school raises the risk of social problems later in life.

For six years, John Donovan's "hobby" was to dig up hard-to-find data on children's use of alcohol. With so much attention paid to binge drinking by high-schoolers and college students, he wanted to shine a light on what was happening with kids even before junior high.

"The younger that people are when they start to drink," says Mr. Donovan, an associate professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, "the more likely they are to have problems with alcohol in adolescence and in later life, and the more likely they are to be involved in a whole variety of other problematic behaviors," like absence from school, delinquency, use of illicit drugs, drunken driving, and risky sexual activity.

By eighth grade, about 40 percent of American students say they've had some alcohol, but Donovan looked at an even younger set in a report just published in the September issue of Prevention Science. He found that between fourth and sixth grades, the prevalence of alcohol use increases significantly. In one national survey, for instance, about 10 percent of fourth-graders and 29 percent of sixth-graders said they'd had more than a sip of alcohol. In a survey in New York State, 21 percent of fifth- and sixth-graders reported having had a drink of alcohol at some point, including 7 percent who had drunk liquor, as distinct from beer or wine.

Broad conclusions can't yet be drawn, because the data are scattered in various substance-use and behavior surveys that span more than a decade, but Donovan's hope is to impel people to examine an age group that's been largely overlooked in alcohol studies. The data suggest that prevention might best be timed around fifth-grade, he says. Such efforts would be most effective, he and others say, if they involve not just schools, but families and whole communities as well.
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