14 DAY TRIAL // A research carried out by Emmanuel Kuntsche, PhD, of Addiction Info Switzerland, Research Institute, Lausanne, and colleagues, concluded that these past years, cultural and gender-based differences in teen drunkenness have declined.
Today, drunkenness has become more common among girls in Eastern Europe and less frequent among boys in Western countries.
The scientists focused on trends in adolescent drunkenness by comparing data from 77,586 15 year-old individuals, out of which 51.5% were girls and 49.5% boys, in 7 Eastern European and 16 Western countries.
Gender and country were taken into consideration when assessing the frequency at which the teens got drunk, and the tendency was tracked over time, thanks to data collected in 1997/1998 and 2005/2006.
The results of this analysis concluded that 15 year-old teenagers got drunk an average of two to three times, during the considered laps of time.
When considering only the 7 Eastern European countries, the researchers found out that the frequency of drunkenness increased by 40% over the study's time period, and that the rise was more consistent among girls.
On the other hand, in 13 out of 16 Western countries, drunkenness frequency declined by 25% on average, especially among boys and in North America, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Scandinavia.
One possible explanation for these results, that the authors gave, was that "with the opening of borders and markets of the formerly planned-economy societies, Eastern European countries increasingly became confronted with contemporary global alcohol marketing strategies that target particularly young people.”
“While alcohol consumption might have appeared to be part of a new and attractive lifestyle element to adolescents in Eastern Europe, during the same period alcohol consumption and drunkenness may have lost some of their appeal to a formerly high-consuming group, i.e., mostly boys in Western Europe and North America,” they add.
“In these areas, the omnipresence of alcohol marketing may have saturated the market, making adolescents more likely to consider the prevailing ways of alcohol consumption as conformist and traditional rather than innovative.”
Alcohol abuse is dangerous because it can lead to “various adverse consequences and health problems such as fatal and non-fatal injuries, blackouts, suicide attempts, unintended pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, academic failure and violence,"” the authors report.
This is why “a responsive public health policy with respect to adolescent drunkenness” is necessary, but this “requires evidence-based information about the change of this behavior over time.”
The report was posted online yesterday, and it will appear in the February 2011 print issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.