Teens in Eastern Europe became more prone to drunkenness in the late 1990s, while excessive alcohol consumption among Western adolescents declined, and the gap between boys’ and girls’ drinking habits narrowed significantly, Swiss investigators report.
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Researchers studying an international survey say reports of drunkenness were 40% higher among teens in Eastern Europe than they were at the start of an 8-year study and that that gap between drinking habits in girls and boys in both Europe and North America is narrowing overall.
Research published online Oct. 4 in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine used data from an ongoing cohort study coordinated by the World Health Organization that is conducted every 4 years among 11-, 13-, and 15-year-olds. Emmanuel Kuntsche, Ph.D., of the Addiction Info Switzerland, a research institute in Lausanne, and his colleagues, analyzed responses from 77,586 questionnaires completed by 15-year old students only, as drinking was deemed more likely to occur in that age group.
Dr. Kuntsche and his colleagues hypothesized that they would find “gender and cultural convergence in drunkenness” over the eight-year period of their study, thanks in part, they wrote, to the Eastern countries’ transition to market economies and the subsequent opening of their borders to “contemporary global alcohol marketing strategies that target particularly young people” (doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2010.191).
Results from the WHO’s Health Behavior in School-Aged Children Study of 15-year-olds in 23 countries showed that in 2005 and 2006, reports of drunkenness (defined as having five or more drinks at a time) were 40% higher among teens in all seven participating Eastern European states than they had been in 1997 and 1998. Teens in the 16 Western European and North American countries, by contrast, reported 25% fewer drunken episodes over the same time span, bringing the drinking tendencies of the Eastern and Western youths closer together. For all the countries analyzed, 15-year-olds in 2005 and 2006 reported being drunk an average of two to three times in their lives.
The researchers also noted a recent gender convergence in drinking habits. Countries with increases in adolescent drunkenness saw marked increases among girls. But, in most of the Western countries where reported drunkenness decreased since 1997 and 1998, the declines were led by boys. Still in all 23 countries, with the exception of Greenland, Norway and the United Kingdom, boys continued to report more drunken episodes than girls.
Using questionnaires that asked students to estimate how many times in their lives they had ever been “really drunk,” (from “never,” to “once,” 2 to 3 times,” “4 to 10 times,” or more), Dr. Kuntsche and his colleagues found the mean frequency of self-reported drunkenness to have increased in the seven participating formerly socialist Eastern European countries by about 40% since the 1997-1998 survey. Significant increases were found for girls in all seven Eastern countries in the survey, whereas for boys the increase was significant only in Estonia, Lithuania, and the Russian Federation. In Lithuania, the frequency of drunkenness nearly doubled among both boys and girls, from 1.81 times to 3.91 times among boys and from 1.13 times to 2.80 times among girls.
In the Western countries, by contrast, reported episodes of drinking declined in 13 of 16 countries surveyed. Drunkenness decreased significantly among boys in eight countries and among girls in seven countries, the investigators found.
Among the 13 countries in which boys had earlier reported more drunkenness than girls, the decrease was greater among boys in Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greenland, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In Finland and Sweden, where (along with Norway) girls had reported more frequent drunkenness than boys in 1997 and 1998, the decline was greater among girls. Girls continued to be drunk more often than were boys in Norway in 2005 and 2006, just as they had been before.
Though no European nations permit the sale of alcohol to 15-year-olds, the legal drinking age is usually either 16 or 18. In the United States, where the legal drinking age is 21, reported drunkenness was on the low end among the countries, with both boys and girls reporting fewer than two episodes in 2005 and 2006, both decreases from 1997 and 1998. “This trend might have been facilitated by policies that restrict marketing and access, and by the increasing development and implementation of evidence-based prevention programs targeting adolescent substance use,” the investigators wrote in their analysis.
Dr. Kuntsche and his colleagues theorized that in Western Europe and North America, “alcohol consumption and drunkenness may have lost some of their appeal to a formerly high-consuming group” during the study period. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, “alcohol consumption might have appeared to be part of a new and attractive lifestyle element.” But in general, the findings – including the narrowing gender gaps – appeared to be consistent with trends in the adult populations of the countries surveyed, the investigators noted.