Not surprising to those familiar with the ACE study, one of the predictors of binge drinking at 16 is exposure to several stressful life events.
Neuroscientists leading the largest longitudinal adolescent brain imaging study to date have learned that predicting teenage binge-drinking is possible. In fact, say the researchers in the group's latest publication, a number of factors -- genetics, brain function and about 40 different variables -- can help scientists predict with about 70 percent accuracy which teens will become binge drinkers. The study appears online July 3, 2014 as an Advance Online Publication in the journal Nature.
First author Robert Whelan, Ph.D., a former University of Vermont (UVM) postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry and current lecturer at University College Dublin, and senior author Hugh Garavan, Ph.D., UVM associate professor of psychiatry, and colleagues conducted 10 hours of comprehensive assessments -- these included neuroimaging to assess brain activity and brain structure, along with other measures such as IQ, cognitive task performance, personality and blood tests -- on each of 2,400 14-year-old adolescents at eight different sites across Europe.
"Our goal was to develop a model to better understand the relative roles of brain structure and function, personality, environmental influences and genetics in the development of adolescent abuse of alcohol," says Whelan. "This multidimensional risk profile of genes, brain function and environmental influences can help in the prediction of binge drinking at age 16 years."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140702131636.htm
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