Early Alcohol Use Linked
to Fighting in Adulthood
Excerpt By Suzanne Rostler, Reuters Health

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Adults who began drinking alcohol in their teens may be more prone to alcohol-related violence, study findings suggest.

According to interviews with more than 42,000 US residents aged 18 and older, those who started drinking before age 17 were three to four times more likely to have been in a fight after consuming alcohol at some time in their lives, compared with adults who began drinking after age 21.

Individuals who drank alcohol at an early age were also three times more likely to have been in a fight after drinking in the past year regardless of their history of alcohol dependence, the number of years they had been drinking, how often they drank heavily or whether they smoked or used drugs.

The study, which is published in the October issue of Pediatrics, highlights pediatricians' responsibility to find out whether their adolescent patients drink alcohol and to discuss the risks of alcohol with those who do, the researchers report. The findings also underscore the need for policies such as a minimum legal drinking age and community-based programs that aim to reduce adolescent drinking, they add.

``The good news is that there are things that can be done,'' Dr. Ralph Hingson, the study's lead author and a researcher from Boston University in Massachusetts, said in an interview.

Alcohol treatment programs, for instance, have been shown to lower the incidence of violent behavior among people who have already developed drinking problems, while policies that restrict young people's access to alcohol can prevent them from drinking in the first place. Additionally, brief counseling sessions by healthcare workers have been shown to reduce drinking and related violence, Hingson explained.

It is not clear why adults who began drinking at younger ages are more likely to fight. It may be that they are more likely to engage in risky behaviors and therefore were more apt to get into fights before they started drinking alcohol, Hingson told Reuters Health. Alternatively, they may be more likely to find themselves in situations or in places where fights occur, such as bars, he noted.

In other findings, 65% of adults reported that they ever drank alcohol, of which nearly half said they began drinking before age 21 and 3% said they began drinking before age 14.

Those who began drinking before age 14 were 11 times more likely to have ever been in a fight while or after drinking and 14 times more likely to have been in a fight in the past year than adults who began drinking later, the report indicates.

Men, smokers, adults who did not graduate from high school, single people and those who used illicit drugs were significantly more likely to have begun drinking earlier in life.

One of the study's limitations, the authors note, is that the results are based on self-reported behavior, which is always subject to difficulty remembering and a lack of willingness to acknowledge certain behaviors.

``Whether there is a direct causal relation between alcohol use and violence is still a subject of investigation,'' Hingson and colleagues write.

SOURCE: Pediatrics 2001;108:872-877.

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