Heavy-drinking college kids make worse decisions

Young adults who binge drink frequently are more likely to show disadvantageous decision-making patterns than their peers who don't drink as heavily, a new study shows.

Furthermore, the earlier a person begins to binge drink, the stronger the tie to poor decision-making skills, Dr. Anna E. Goudriaan and colleagues from the University of Missouri-Columbia report.

However, the study wasn't able to demonstrate which came first -- a bad approach to decision-making or a tendency to drink heavily.

Adolescence and early adulthood are both a time when many people drink heavily and a key period for making important life decisions, Goudriaan and her team note in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
To determine whether a person's drinking habits might be related to strategies for decision-making, the researchers had 200 male and female college students complete a test called the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a computer card game that involves trying to devise a winning approach by choosing cards from advantageous, rather than disadvantageous, decks.

Students had completed a questionnaire on their binge drinking frequency once a year for four years, beginning with the summer before their freshman year. Binge drinking was defined as consuming five or more drinks in a single sitting.

They were divided into four groups based on drinking histories: one group had a low level of binge drinking, meaning they reported binge drinking once or not at all over the past 30 days; the second group binge drank moderately; the third showed an increase in their tendency to binge drink over the course of the study; and the fourth group binge drank heavily throughout the study.

The young men and women in the chronic high binge drinking group performed worse on the gambling task, on average, than those who drank less, and the earlier they had begun binge drinking, the worse they fared.

Goudriaan and her colleagues conclude: "Although a causal link has yet to be established, our findings indicate that binge drinking at a younger age and prolonged binge drinking are associated with worse decision making."

SOURCE: Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, June 2007.