Author(s): Henk FJ Hendriks and Ilse C Schrieks
Adolescents consume alcohol in moderation mainly to enjoy and enhance mood but adolescents also drink hazardously, e.g. to cope with stressful life events. Drinking hazardously may be related to the developing adolescent brain going through a number of structural and physiological changes. These structural and physiological changes affect adolescent behavior aimed at gaining experience in life. Adolescent drinking patterns vary and may include risky behaviors such as binge drinking. Motivations to drink and risk factors for binge drinking and alcohol abuse are both internal and external. Internal risk factors include amongst others genetic predisposition to have less self-control, whereas external risk factors includes early life stress. Integrative approaches underline the value of multi-domain analysis for prediction; any one feature in isolation only modestly predicts drinking behavior. Health consequences of drinking vary widely depending on dose and drinking pattern. Moderate alcohol drinking may be associated with a lower incidence of chronic disease and mental health, whereas alcohol binging and abuse appear to negatively affect social functioning mainly in the short term and mental and physical health in the long term. Resilience towards behaving non responsibly may best prevent alcohol abuse and stimulate enjoyment of moderate alcohol consumption. Limitations in current knowledge concern the interpretation of alcohol drinking being the cause for adolescent risky behavior, generalizability of findings on abusing adolescents to the general population and insufficient knowledge of relevant covariates and mediators.
