|
 Researchers examined data on drinking habits and death records for
almost 15,000 adults who were followed for almost three decades.
Compared to participants who said they never got drunk, people who
did this at least once before age 15 were 47 percent more likely to
die during the study period, while getting drunk at 15 or older was
associated with 20 percent higher odds of death.
"Early onset of drinking and drunkenness are associated with alcohol
use disorders, and therefore may play a role in elevated alcohol use
disorder-related mortality rates," said lead study author Hui Hu, a
public health researcher at the University of Florida in
Gainesville.
But the study results suggest that addiction isn't the only factor
contributing to premature deaths for early drinkers, Hu said by
email.
"We found that an estimated 21 percent of the total effects of early
drunkenness were mediated through alcohol use disorders, suggesting
that many other factors in addition to alcohol use disorders may
play important roles," Hu said.
To explore the connection between early drunkenness and a premature
death, researchers analyzed data from interviews conducted in the
early 1980s that asked people if they had ever had a drunken episode
and how old they were the first time it happened. Most participants
were between 18 and 44 years old when they completed the interviews.
A total of 9,089 participants, or 61 percent, said they had been
drunk, with most of them first getting drunk at or after age 15.
About 13 percent of the people who had been drunk did this for the
first time before they turned 15.
About 37 percent of the people who got drunk before age 15 had
diagnosed alcohol use disorders at the time of the baseline
interviews, compared to an 11 percent rate of these disorders in the
overall group, researchers report in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
By the end of the study period, 26 percent of those who had been
drunk before age 15 had died, compared to about 23 percent of those
who got drunk later and 19 percent of those who had never been
drunk.
The study wasn't a controlled experiment designed to prove whether
or how people's age when they first get drunk influences how long
they live.
Another limitation of the study is that researchers combined people
who said they never got drunk and people who abstained from alcohol
altogether into one category. They also didn't distinguish between
teens who got drunk at 13 or 14 from kids who got drunk even
younger, the authors note.
[to top of second column] |
"We know that alcohol abuse leads to earlier mortality, but it is
also possible that earlier abuse reflects other genetic or
environmental characteristics that lead to earlier mortality," Dr.
Michael Criqui, a public health researcher at the University of
California, San Diego, School of Medicine who wasn't involved in the
study, said by email.
Early drunkenness might point to other risk factors such as
risk-taking behavior, mental health issues or a lack of social or
economic support that might influence overall health and longevity,
noted Dr. Gregory Marcus, a researcher at the University of
California, San Francisco, who wasn't involved in the study.
"No one should interpret these data to mean that their fate is
sealed," Marcus said by email. "On the contrary, these findings are
useful exactly because they may help us identify those at risk so we
can prevent these adverse outcomes."
Because the increased mortality risk exists even among people
without alcohol addiction, it's possible that people who aren't
diagnosed with alcohol use disorders might still need be careful
about how much they drink, said Joy Bohyun Jang of the Institute for
Social Research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
"Those with alcohol use disorders may receive attention to their
alcohol use behaviors by practitioners or they themselves may be
cautious about their alcohol use," Jang, who wasn't involved in the
study, said by email. "But what this study tells us is that those
without alcohol use disorder may need the same level of attention if
they experience drunkenness early in their life."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2s85KhJ Drug and Alcohol Dependence, online
May 16, 2017.
[© 2017 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2017 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
