Drinking at a Young Age may Affect Genes and Lead to Greater the Risk for Alcohol Dependence
The study, lead by scientists from the Washington School of Medicine in St Louis, concluded that the age at which a person first drinks alcohol may influence genes that have been linked to alcoholism, which essentially makes the youngest drinkers most susceptible to severe problems.
The subjects of the research were over 6,000 adult twins from Australia. The research was conducted to examine a possible link between drinking at an early age and alcohol dependency later in life.
The research subjects were between the ages of twenty five and thirty six when they were interviewed, but some actually reported having taken their first real alcoholic drink at the age of five or six. Upon examination of the data, which was culled from an earlier study, the researchers found that those who had begun drinking at 15 or younger seemed to have a greater genetic tendency for alcoholism, while those who abstained until later. There were cases in which people that first imbibed at an older age, sixteen and up, did develop problem drinking habits later in life but researchers concluded that their problems stemmed from environmental, not genetic factors.
According to first author of the study Arpana Agrawal, Ph.D “There seemed to be a greater genetic influence in those who took their first full drink at a younger age.”That’s very consistent with what has been predicted in the literature and in the classification of types of alcohol dependence, but we present a unique test of the hypothesis.”
By studying twins, the group had advantages over other studies investigating genetic and environmental causes of alcoholism. Twins share 100% of the same DNA , so any differences in alcohol consumption between a set of twins must logically be related to environmental, not genetic influences.
“Particularly identical twins offer us the opportunity to study the perfect natural experiment of genetically identical individuals whose drinking trajectories are modified by their shared and unique life experiences,” Dr Agrawal further explains.
The team will now continue their work and try to pinpoint exactly what the precise mechanisms are in the younger brain that may lead to an increased risk of becoming a problem drinker.
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:33 am
I didn’t think there was any doubt that early drinking indicated a propensity towards adult alchohol abuse. I myself started drinking at age 13 and have only recently quit drinking at 55. I got tired of having hangovers. I figure I had 15 hangovers a year for 42 years=630days hungover. When I realized I’d been sick for 2years of my life because of alcohol I just quit (this was actually quite a conservative number too). The hangovers aren’t worth the drinking. I don’t really miss the drinking at all but I wonder if I’d not started at 13 maybe I wouldn’t have bothered to keep doing it so long.