Heavy Drinking During Teen Years May Harm Brain Development, Study Finds

By Elizabeth Lopatto - Oct 19, 2010
bloomberg.com

Heavy drinking as a teenager may change brain development, affecting areas involved in judgment, social skills and decision-making, according to a study.

Researchers determined that teenagers scored worse on a battery of psychological tests if they were diagnosed with substance abuse or dependence, compared with nonabusing teens, according to a study in the journal Alcoholism. The study also found that the adolescents who used marijuana had significantly poorer memory than those who didn’t.

Adolescence is a time when the brain develops rapidly and social skills, foresight and abstract reasoning are developed, according to previous research. Those are areas of the mind that are consistently impaired in adult alcoholics, according to background material in today’s study.

“The presence of clinically significant binge drinking and marijuana use diverts the course of normal cognitive development,” wrote the authors, led by Robert Thoma, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

The study examined 19 adolescents with a diagnosis of alcohol abuse or dependence who were an average of 16 years old. They told researchers they had about 13 drinks a day, on the days they decided to drink. That group was compared with 15 teens, with an average age of 14.7 years, who had no history of substance abuse. This group reported having an average of less than one drink on the days they chose to drink