Posts Tagged Alcohol Abuse

Underage drinking is a major public health concern in the United States. The 2011 Monitoring the Future Survey reported that 33 percent of 8th graders and 70 percent of 12th graders had tried alcohol. Among the consequences of underage drinking include physical and sexual assault, alcohol-related car crashes, abuse of other banned substances, school problems, physical hangovers or illnesses, and death from alcohol poisoning — to name a few.

In 2010, there were more than 185,000 emergency rooms visits by persons under age 21 for injuries and other conditions linked to alcohol. In the passing of years, this figure may either increase or drop, but  to say that underage drinking will totally never going to occur anymore is perhaps next to impossible. Still, preventive measures are there to reduce the problem.

On the national, state and local levels, some of the prevention strategies being enforced to curb underage drinking include increasing alcohol excise taxes, reducing youth exposure to alcohol advertising, and development of comprehensive community-based programs.

At home, what parents can do is to talk to their kids about alcohol abuse.

According to a recent study by researchers from Penn State University, discussing alcohol drinking with teenagers before they start college can both reduce the risk that light drinkers will become heavy drinkers, and increase the likelihood that heavy drinkers will slow down or stop the habit.

“Over 90 percent of teens try alcohol outside the home before they graduate from high school,” Robert Turrisi, professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State, said in a university news release. “It is well known that fewer problems develop for every year that heavy drinking is delayed. Our research over the past decade shows that parents can play a powerful role in minimizing their teens’ drinking during college when they talk to their teens about alcohol before they enter college.”

Turrisi and colleagues studied 1,900 randomly selected incoming freshmen  — each of them was identified as belonging to one of four groups: nondrinkers, weekend light drinkers, weekend heavy drinkers and heavy drinkers.

Parents of the student participants were provided with a handbook containing information that included an overview of college student drinking, strategies and techniques for communicating effectively, ways to help teens develop assertiveness and resist peer pressure and in-depth information on how alcohol affects the body.

The researchers found that teens remain in the non-drinking or light-drinking groups when their parents followed the recommendations in the handbook and talked to their teens before they enter college. Similarly, teens transition out of a heavy-drinking group (if they were already heavy drinkers) when their parents talked to them about drinking before they set foot on campus.

Turrisi said talking to teens in the fall of the first year of college may not work as well; for many families it had no effect on students’ drinking behaviors. Similarly, adding extra parent materials in the fall seemed to have no additional benefit.