Tag: underage drinking

April is Alcohol Awareness Month

This year’s theme “Help for Today, Hope for Tomorrow” focuses on educating young people about the dangers of alcohol abuse.

April is Alcohol Awareness Month. In 2019, the focus is on underage drinking.

Alcohol abuse/addiction have taken a backseat to the epidemic of opioid abuse that has swept the country. However, alcohol abuse continues to increase in America.

Alcohol Awareness Month, established in 1987, was created in part to reduce the stigma of alcoholism and to support local communities in addressing alcohol-related issues.

A 2015 NSDUH study of young people between the ages of 12 to 17 estimated that 623,000 adolescents ages had alcohol use disorder, or AUD. (This study looked at 298,000 male and 325,000 female subjects.)

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), alcohol use disorder is defined as “a chronic relapsing brain disease characterized by compulsive alcohol use, loss of control over alcohol intake, and a negative emotional state when not using.”

Signs of teen problematic drinking are similar to the signs of drug addiction, according to Project Know—including shirking of regular responsibilities (such as ditching school or suddenly getting bad grades), lack of interest in relationships, irresponsible behavior or a change in appearance such as exhaustion, weight loss or gain, or sudden lack of concern for appearance.

Teens who have a family or personal history of addiction or mental health issues are more at risk of alcohol abuse, as are teens who are under greater stress due to socioeconomic or personal circumstance.

The theme of Alcohol Awareness Month with its focus on youth drinking is “Changing Attitudes—It’s not a rite of passage.” This slogan seeks to change the cultural idea that heavy drinking is an important or expected part of teenage social life.

The first weekend of April, the National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependence (NCADD) is encouraging the public participate in Alcohol-Free Weekend. NCADD offers this weekend as a gesture of solidarity in our communities in support of alcohol-free youths, in remaining completely alcohol-free for three days.

The Office of Disease Prevention offered these ideas as April’s action tool kit for communities:

1. Share about April’s Alcohol Awareness month and focus on underage drinking on social media.

2. Host a community event where families can learn about the issues around underage alcohol use and abuse.

View the original article at thefix.com

4 April 2019
How Teen Drinking May Affect Brain Growth

Researchers investigated whether drinking alcohol during the teen years stunted brain growth.

Drinking alcohol could stunt brain growth in teenagers and increase their risk for problematic drinking in the long term, according to a recent study.

The findings were published in the journal eNeuro. To examine the effects of alcohol on brain development, scientists allowed rhesus macaque monkeys to drink as much as they wanted. They tracked how much the monkeys ate and drank, and used MRIs to measure their brain growth.

“Heavy alcohol reduced the rate of brain growth” by 0.25 milliliters per year for every gram of alcohol consumed per kilogram of body weight, the researchers found. Smaller brain volume can be associated with less cognitive abilities, because there are fewer connections in the brain.

During the teen years, the brain is rapidly growing and developing, which may explain why teens are particularly vulnerable to the brain-stunting effects of alcohol.

“The transition from adolescence to adulthood is associated with brain remodeling in the final stages of developmental growth. It is also a period when a large proportion of this age group engages to binge and heavy alcohol drinking,” study authors wrote.

The stunted growth could lead to long-term cognitive effects, although further studies would be needed to examine that theory.

“This is the age range when the brain is being fine-tuned to fit adult responsibilities. The question is, does alcohol exposure during this age range alter the lifetime learning ability of individuals?” lead author Dr. Tatiana Shnitko said to The Journal.

In addition to affecting brain volume, drinking during the teen years also seemed to be associated with heavier drinking later in life in the monkeys that were studied.

“Thus, developmental brain volume changes in the span of late adolescence to young adulthood in macaques is altered by excessive alcohol, an insult (the cause of some kind of physical or mental injury) that may be linked to the continuation of heavy drinking throughout later adult life,” they wrote.

This indicates that early drinking could lead to lifelong problems in humans’ drinking patterns as well.

While not all the effects from monkeys can be extrapolated to humans, studying the effects of alcohol on primates’ brains is a powerful tool for researchers. Study author Christopher Kroenke said that using monkeys allowed researchers to control for factors and focus on the specific effects of alcohol use.

“Human studies are based on self-reporting of underage drinkers,” he said. “Our measures pinpoint alcohol drinking with the impaired brain growth.”

The amount of alcohol that affected brain health would be equivalent to about four beers a day.

View the original article at thefix.com

3 April 2019
Students "Take Back" Billboards To Reduce Alcohol Advertising

Students at the school said that alcohol use among teens is universally accepted so their anti-drinking campaign is necessary.

A school in California is trying to reduce the number of alcohol advertisements that its students see by purchasing billboard ad space and replacing alcohol ads with messages that encourage kids to avoid drinking.

A nonprofit associated with Roosevelt High in Fresno purchased the ad space and replaced it with an ad showing teens who chose education over alcohol. There are plans for at least one more billboard in Fresno.

Fresno Unified Superintendent Bob Nelson told ABC30, “For folks that are making good choices and prioritizing education over drugs and alcohol that you have some like-minded colleagues. So kids finding each other and willing to say hey I’m not willing to let anything get in my way of college is a really strong message.”

The billboard that is up now shows eight students from Roosevelt High with the caption “I choose my education over alcohol.”

Students at the school said that alcohol use among teens is universally accepted, so taking a dramatic stance with something as visible as billboard is important.

Sophomore Nicole Lee said, “When we go to parties, my uncles would give my cousins drinks when they’re 18, so you’re basically breaking the law. I came to a point where I’m taking a stand so I’m going to do something to change that.”

Christina Garcia, another sophomore, agreed that talking about the dangers of alcohol for teens is important.

“Coming from me as a youth I have friends that say drinking is this and drinking is my life and OK it’s your life but what about your life. You’re just going to throw away your life for alcohol,” she said.

Despite the experiences of teens at Roosevelt High, researchers have found that teen drinking rates are actually decreasing. According to researchers who conducted the Monitoring The Future survey, which looks at substance use among middle and high school students, teen drinking peaked in 1997 and has decreased 60% since then.

Last year, binge drinking among seniors in high school decreased by 2.8%. Fourteen percent of high school seniors reported that they had engaged in binge drinking in the prior two weeks.

At the same time, vaping of nicotine and marijuana has increased dramatically among teens, worrying health providers. More than 7% of teens reported that they had vaped marijuana in the past 30 days, while the percent of teens who had vaped nicotine doubled to 21%.

View the original article at thefix.com

15 March 2019
Does Teen Drinking Affect Metabolism?

A recent study examined how underage drinking affected the metabolism of teens ages 13 to 17.

In addition to it being illegal, underage drinkers now have another reason to refrain from drinking alcohol, as a recent study has determined that teenage alcohol use can negatively impact metabolism.

The study was based on a previous study done by the same team of researchers at the University of Eastern Finland, which found that drinking may decrease gray matter volume in teenagers’ brains. Researchers believe the decrease in gray matter and negative impact on metabolism may be connected.

“Despite [the participants’] alcohol use being ‘normal,’ their metabonomic profile and brain gray matter volumes differed from those in the light-drinking participant group,” Noora Heikkinen, a researcher from the University of Eastern Finland’s Institute of Clinical Medicine, told Newsweek.

The recent study was published in the journal Alcohol and was a followup to a study in which data was collected on teens between the ages of 13 and 17 in eastern Finland.

The original data was collected between 2004 and 2005. At that time, the teens completed questionnaires about their hobbies, family life, lifestyle and substance use.

Additionally, they took a test created by the World Health Organization which is designed to identify alcohol use disorders. Some of the questions had to do with how much alcohol they drank on a typical day of drinking and how often they consumed more than six drinks at a time.

For the recent study, which was done between 2013 and 2015, researchers recruited 40 moderate-to-heavy drinkers and 40 light drinkers. The light drinkers had scored a maximum of two on the World Health Organization test, which meant they drank two to four times monthly.

Moderate-to-heavy drinkers were those who had a score of four or more for males, or three or more for females. This meant drinking two to three or four or more times weekly.

With those participants, researchers measured metabolism and the volume of gray matter in the brain.

In doing so, researchers found that the moderate-to-heavy drinkers had undergone changes in their amino acids and how their energy was processed, when compared to the lighter drinkers. In heavy drinkers, there was also an increase in 1-methylhistamine levels, a substance connected to the amount of gray matter in the brain.

Heikkinen tells Newsweek that based on the findings, researchers believe histamine production rises in the brains of adolescents who drink heavily.

“This observation can help in the development of methods that make it possible to detect adverse effects caused by alcohol at a very early stage,” she said. “Possibly, it could also contribute to the development of new treatments to mitigate these adverse effects.”

Heikkinen also added that some of the damage may be reversible if drinking is cut back.

“There is evidence that at least some of the changes are reversible if the heavy drinking is discontinued,” she told Newsweek. “Therefore all hope is not lost for those who have had their share of parties and binge drinking in the twenties. However, if the heavy drinking is continued for decades, there is a real chance that irreversible brain atrophy will result.”

View the original article at thefix.com

12 July 2018