Substantial Increase in Death Rates from Alcohol-Related Diseases in the U.K.

 A new study has found that there has been a substantial increase in death rates from alcohol-related diseases in socioeconomically deprived areas of England and Wales. Researchers at the University of Sheffield published the findings in the journal BMC Public Health.

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Teens Who Drink with their Parents Drink More Outside of Home

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. n 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.

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Research Finds Better Ways to Predict Violent Behaviors

New research shows that diagnosing severe personality disorders, evaluating the childhood environment, assessing alcohol consumption, and analyzing the MAOA genotype may provide more accurate means for assessing risk among violent offenders, according to the Finnish research carried out jointly at the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki University Central Hospital Psychiatry Centre.

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Young Men Living with Parents More Likely to be Violent and Have Alcohol Problems

A new study by researchers at Queen Mary, University of London finds that young men who stay at home with their parents tend to be more violent than those who live independently. Researchers also found that men still living at home in their early twenties have fewer responsibilities and more disposable income to spend on alcohol.

Science Daily reports that this group makes up only four percent of the UK’s male population but that it is responsible for 16 percent of all violent injuries in the last five years. In the US and UK, delaying social independence and remaining in the parental home have become more common over the past 40 years.

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Genetic Cause of Fetal Alcohol-Related Developmental Disorders Found

A new animal study found a specific genetic cause of fetal alcohol-related developmental disorders. When pregnant women consume alcohol, the genetic processes that control thyroid hormone levels in the fetal brain are interfered with.

Fetal alcohol exposure can cause neurodevelopmental disorders such as emotional behavioral disorders and deficits in learning, memory, and speech. Past animal research has shown that some of these lasting cognitive impairments occur because alcohol consumption during pregnancy decreases the level of maternal thyroid hormones and therefore fetal thyroid hormones. There is currently no treatment for this.

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Smoking Declines While Drug and Alcohol Use Remain Steady

A new report on substance abuse and mental health shows that while more people are quitting smoking (or not starting in the first place), alcohol and illicit drug use still remain steady. The study also shows that drug use varies widely across the country; for example, the rate of illicit drug use among people ages 12 and older in Rhode Island is more than half (12.5 percent) of what it is in Iowa (5.2 percent).

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Allowing Children to Drink Can Lead to Binge Drinking

Legal drinking ages are as varied as the states and countries that impose them. In the United Kingdom, you can legally give alcohol to any child over 5 years old, but you cannot purchase alcohol until you are 16 (for beer, wine, or cider) or 18 (for hard liquor). In Spain, you must be 14 to drink alcohol and 16 to purchase it; in Italy and Greece, there is no age limit for drinking alcohol but you must be 16 or 17, respectively, to buy it. In Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, it is completely illegal to drink or purchase alcohol, and offenders are punished with lashes. And in some states in India, one cannot drink or purchase alcohol until the age of 25.

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Use Science to Talk to Your Teens about Drinking

If you’re a parent, you should assume that your child will be tempted to drink on prom night and other celebrations that mark the end of the school year. In a 2005 survey of high school students, about 43 percent had consumed alcohol in the past 30 days, and 75 percent had tried alcohol at least once. Even more concerning, about one in three students had been a passenger in a car driven by someone who had been drinking.

But instead of just sharing these statistics with your kids and telling them not to drink, use science to reinforce the message. The American Association for the Advancement of Science offers a Science Inside Alcohol Project, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol and Alcoholism, which suggests educating kids about the science of alcohol to explain how it affects adult and adolescent brains differently.

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