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One trend the study will investigate is the tendency of young people to drink in excess. The ABCD study, for Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development, will measure alcohol and drug use in the youths enrolled, assess cognitive function via neuropsychiatric tests, and track brain changes with annual neuroimaging scans. To better understand how early alcohol use affects brain development, the NIH is undertaking a large longitudinal study that will follow 10,000 children beginning at age 9 or 10. “If you start drinking at 12, you have a three- to four-fold higher likelihood of alcohol-use disorder later in life than if you start drinking at age 21.” The research was one reason the legal age of drinking was raised to 21 in every state beginning in the 1970’s, culminating with the passage of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act in 1984. “The younger you engage in misuse of alcohol, the more likely you are to have an alcohol-use disorder later in life,” says George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), citing the seminal findings of NIAAA-funded work by Bridget Grant and colleagues.

The frontal cortex doesn’t fully develop until around age 25, and emerging data suggest that this executive area of the brain is particularly susceptible to damage from alcohol use during adolescence. Adolescents account for approximately 11 percent of total alcohol consumption in the U.S., according to a CDC fact sheet on underage drinking.īecause the teenage brain is at a highly vulnerable stage of development, early drinking may set the stage for later alcohol abuse.

While rates of underage drinking have declined steadily in the past decade or so, the most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that among US youth 12 to 20 years old surveyed about their alcohol use in the past 30 days, 20 percent reported drinking alcohol and 13 percent reported binge drinking.

Underage drinking is a significant public health problem in the United States.

Blacking out alcohol brain damage 2 beer