The drop in frequent binge drinking (FBD) among adolescents can be attributed to age, period, and cohort effects, but there are variations in certain subgroups of teens, said Joy Bohyun Jang, PhD, and her associates.
The decline in FBD is not as great in teen girls, African American youth, and youth from low socioeconomic backgrounds, so those groups deserve close attention by researchers and clinicians, they said.
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The study used an age-period-cohort analysis to examine how these variables affected drinking trends among adolescents, with a particular focus on FBD, which was defined as two or more occasions of consuming at least five alcoholic drinks in a row in the past 2 weeks.
FBD decreased in recent years in all ages during adolescence, suggesting that declines in teen FBD in the past 25 years were “driven by factors influencing all age groups simultaneously as well as influences on particular birth cohorts,” the researchers said. These factors might include greater public efforts to lessen the risk of underage drinking and disapproval of heavy alcohol use among the recent cohorts of teens. “Those born around 1990 had the highest decline of FBD compared with those in the preceding and subsequent cohorts of adolescents.”
But there are variations in FBD among teens by demographics. Boys and those of higher socioeconomic status (SES) showed rapid increases in FBD by age, compared with girls and teens of lower SES, respectively. However, there also has been a convergence in FBD by sex in the more recent time periods because of greater declines in FBD among boys than in girls. Likewise, there is a growing discrepancy by SES in FBD in U.S. teens because higher SES teens were less likely than those from a lower SES to engage in FBD and “the strength of the association is growing in more recent time periods.”
African American youth had the lowest rates of FBD for all the racial groups, yet declines in FBD have been slower among African American youth, compared with white adolescents, since 2007, reported Dr. Jang of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her associates.
The study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Jang and her associates said they had no relevant financial disclosures.