Posted on February 24, 2010

When teens engage in underage drinking, the possibility of a hangover is really just the beginning of things to worry about. A new study shows that heavy drinking on the part of a teen can cause brain damage that can impact thinking and memory skills.

Teens are increasingly engaging in drinking for pleasure and binge drinking. This heavy drinking – characterized by four or five drinks at a time or more as often as a couple of times a weekend – counteracts with a teen’s belief that they are immortal and have little to worry about other than a hangover the next day.

The journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors published this study which took a closer look at the effects of binge drinking on the brains of teenagers. Susan Tapert, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego, one of the authors of this study joined a live conversation regarding the study and its impact.

Tapert shared that one benefit to this study was that researchers characterized kids within the study before any of them had started drinking. As a result, they were able to create a baseline before following their drinking habits and measuring the results.

One interesting finding was the difference in gender preferences. For girls, researchers found that those who started to drink a little bit more heavily in their teenage years, they went downhill on tasks associated with spatial functioning when compared with girls who were non-drinkers.

For boys, the impact was more profound on attentional tasks. Those boys who took to heavy drinking episodes as adolescents had a difficult time doing the boring tasks where focus is required. Things that required focus, quick work and were not very excited, these boys had a hard time completing.