Substance Abuse News

Social factors have consistently been implicated as a cause of vulnerability to alcohol use and abuse. The reverse is also true, in that individuals who engage in excessive drinking may alter their social context. New research on drinking among older adults has found that older adults who have more money, engage in more social activities, and whose friends approve more of drinking are more likely to engage in excessive or high-risk drinking.

Results will be published in the April 2010 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

“Ours is one of the first studies to focus longitudinally on high-risk drinking among older adults,” said Rudolf H. Moos, senior research career scientist for the Department of Veterans Affairs Health Care System in Palo Alto, California, as well as corresponding author for the study, “and the first to have 10-year and 20-year follow-ups addressing this issue.”

Social and Financial Influences

Moos and his colleagues examined 719 (399 men, 320 women) 55 to 65-year-old adults at baseline (between 1986-1988), and then again 10 and 20 years later. At each contact point, participants provided information regarding their drinking, as well as their social and financial resources.

“Our findings show that, one, certain social factors may enhance the chances of an individual engaging in high-risk drinking and, two, once high-risk drinking has developed, social choices may be made to facilitate continuing this behavior,” said Moos.

More specifically, results showed that older adults who have more money, who engage in more social activities, and whose friends approve more of drinking are more likely to engage in what is considered high-risk drinking: more than three drinks per day or more than 14 drinks per week.

“These findings show that social contextual models of alcohol use apply to older drinkers,” observed Charles J. Holahan, a professor in the department of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. “The findings undercut the assumption of a solely dispositional view of drinking among older adults, whose alcohol use might easily be assumed to be outside the sway of social influences after a lifetime of drinking. They also provide a textured picture of two processes that link social context and alcohol misuse in a reciprocal way—social causation, whereby social context shapes alcohol use, and social selection, whereby alcohol use in turn shapes social context.”

“Older adults who engage in high-risk alcohol consumption tend to select friends who are more likely to drink and to approve of drinking,” said Moos. “They may also experience a decline in the quality of relationships with extended family members, that is, high-risk drinking may impair some family relationships. Compared to older women, older men may be more vulnerable or susceptible to some social influences on drinking. Specifically, having more money, and friends who approve more of drinking, seem to be more closely related to high-risk drinking among older men than among older women.”

Alcohol Problems Don’t Go Away

“The findings serve to undercut a solely person-blame approach to later life drinking,” said Holahan. “They demonstrate that a spouse and friends can make a constructive difference in later life drinking. However, a spouse and friends can also unwittingly become caught up as facilitators in the process of later life drinking. The findings also encourage awareness that alcohol misuse does not go away with aging. Although alcohol consumption declined with aging, at the 20-year follow-up more than 20 percent of adults aged 75 to 85 still engaged in high-risk alcohol consumption.”

“This information can be used to teach older adults, and family members and friends who care about and have some responsibility for them, about how to avoid or minimize ‘triggers,’ such as specific social activities or interactions with friends associated with heavy drinking,” said Moos. “While this type of information might be useful for brief interventions for older adults in primary care or community settings, there is no inherent reason why family members and friends of older adults who engage in excessive drinking could not use it.”

Parents who try to teach responsible drinking by letting their teenagers have alcohol at home may be well intentioned, but they may also be wrong, according to a new study in the latest issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Risks of Developing Alcohol Problems

In a study of 428 Dutch families, researchers found that the more teenagers were allowed to drink at home, the more they drank outside of home as well. What’s more, teens who drank under their parents’ watch or on their own had an elevated risk of developing alcohol-related problems.

Drinking problems included trouble with school work, missed school days and getting into fights with other people, among other issues.

The findings, say the researchers, put into question the advice of some experts who recommend that parents drink with their teenage children to teach them how to drink responsibly — with the aim of limiting their drinking outside of the home.

That advice is common in the Netherlands, where the study was conducted, but it is based more on experts’ reasoning than on scientific evidence, according to Dr. Haske van der Vorst, the lead researcher on the study.

“The idea is generally based on common sense,” says van der Vorst, of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. “For example, the thinking is that if parents show good behavior — here, modest drinking — then the child will copy it. Another assumption is that parents can control their child’s drinking by drinking with the child.”

But the current findings suggest that is not the case.

Don’t Let Children Drink

Based on this and earlier studies, van der Vorst says, “I would advise parents to prohibit their child from drinking, in any setting or on any occasion.”

The study included 428 families with two children between the ages of 13 and 15. Parents and teens completed questionnaires on drinking habits at the outset and again one and two years later.

The researchers found that, in general, the more teens drank at home, the more they tended to drink elsewhere; the reverse was also true, with out-of-home drinking leading to more drinking at home. In addition, teens who drank more often, whether in or out of the home, tended to score higher on a measure of problem drinking two years later.

Drinking Begets More Drinking

The findings, according to van der Vorst, suggest that teen drinking begets more drinking — and, in some cases, alcohol problems — regardless of where and with whom they drink.

“If parents want to reduce the risk that their child will become a heavy drinker or problem drinker in adolescence,” she says, “they should try to postpone the age at which their child starts drinking.”