A four-year study, published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, has found that teenagers are not put off by the negative effects of alcohol.
Researchers followed over 12,700 students aged 12 to 15 from 105 schools across Northern Ireland and Scotland to assess how early exposure to alcohol goes on to influence drinking habits in adolescence and later life.
The results revealed that seemingly minor alcohol-related harms often lead to more serious consequences. What teens might consider insignificant problems — drinking more than planned or being sick after drinking — frequently served as gateways to more severe outcomes.
“Experiencing the negative effects of drinking does not appear to significantly reduce young peoples willingness to engage in alcohol consumption,” researchers found, suggesting that prevention strategies relying solely on educating teens about alcohol’s harmful effects may be ineffective.
By age 15, approximately a quarter of participants reported drinking more than they had intended, showing how common issues with self-regulation become as adolescents progress through their teenage years.
These findings are particularly concerning given the scale of alcohol-related harm in the UK. Alcohol misuse is the leading risk factor for death, ill-health, and disability among 15-49 year-olds in the UK. In England alone, an estimated 10.8 million adults are drinking at levels that pose risks to their health, with around 1.6 million showing signs of alcohol dependence.
Certain harms, such as drinking more than planned or being sick while drinking, were facilitators of other more serious harms, the researchers noted. Harms that might be thought of as ‘minor’ by adolescents, or an expected part of the drinking experience, should still be a focus of alcohol work.
Applying network analysis — a method that examines interconnections between different factors — the study identified that deliberately planning to get drunk and inability to control intoxication levels were central to all other alcohol-related problems.
“Actively planning to get drunk, coupled with an inability to control levels of intoxication appeared central to each network, facilitating the emergence of all other alcohol-related harms,” according to the findings.
While most serious consequences like trouble with police remained relatively rare even among 15-year-olds, the researchers noted that relationships between different alcohol harms became more predictable as students aged.
The researchers concluded that “interventions aimed at improving the capacity to self-regulate alcohol consumption, and actively challenging the planning of drunken episodes, may be pivotal in reducing the emergence of both acute and chronic alcohol-related harms in adolescence.”
This study represents one of the first applications of network analysis to understand how alcohol-related problems evolve during adolescence. The Office for National Statistics reports that in 2022, there were 9,641 alcohol-specific deaths in the UK, a rate of 14.9 per 100,000 people. This represents a 27.4% increase compared to 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. Among people under 30, alcohol-related hospital admissions have risen by over 15% in the past five years. According to a 2022 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, the legalisation of cannabis leads to lower use of alcohol, cigarettes, and pain medications by young adults.
