A person’s IQ in high school is linked to the amount of alcohol he or she consumes later in life, a new study shows.
Researchers looked at the drinking habits of a randomized sample of 8,254 participants between 53 and 65 years old and compared them to their IQs collected during their senior year of high school.
They found that for every one point increase in IQ, a person was 1.6 percent more likely to engage in moderate to heavy alcohol use.
Moderate drinking was classified as consuming one to 29 drinks per month for women and one to 59 for men, and heavy drinking was classified as women drinking 30 alcoholic drinks or more per month and 60 drinks or more for men.
Dr. E. Sherwood Brown, lead author of the study and professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern, said, “We’re not saying that your IQ in high school determines your fate.
‘But IQ levels can lead to intervening social factors that influence drinking, and it is an important mechanism to investigate.
“A higher IQ seemed to predict a greater likelihood of becoming a moderate or heavy drinker, but not a binge drinker.”
Research has shown a link between people who have a higher IQ in high school and consume more alcohol later in life
Alcohol consumption among people aged 50 and older in the US is increasing, with studies showing increases in both total alcohol consumption and binge drinking.
According to one Gallup poll published in August, approximately 55 percent of adults age 55 and older consume moderate to heavy amounts of alcohol.
This statistic made Dr. Brown wonder if there was a link between people’s IQ levels and their drinking habits, following previous research linking cognitive skills to future alcohol consumption.
‘That led me to the question: if alcohol influences cognition, can cognition also influence alcohol consumption?’ he said.
To answer this question, researchers looked at data from a Wisconsin Longitudinal Study that collected the IQs and lifestyle information of more than 10,000 local high school students in 1957.
“The purpose … was to assess the relationship between adolescent IQ and alcohol use in midlife and to investigate possible mediators of this relationship,” the study said.
The researchers compared this information to research on these students’ drinking habits later in life and found that those with higher IQs were likely to consume more alcohol.
People with high IQs may be heavier drinkers because they have careers that require more social drinking
Although IQ was related to heavy drinking, the study found that participants with higher levels of intelligence had “significantly fewer episodes of binge drinking.”
The main difference between binge drinking and heavy drinking is the frequency with which the alcohol is consumed.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines heavy drinking as men consuming five or more drinks per day, or more than 15 drinks per week, and four or more per day for women and at least eight per week.
Those who are binge drinkers consume five or more drinks within two hours for men and four or more within the same time frame for women.
The researchers reported that their findings may be partially influenced by the person’s income level, because people with higher IQs are more likely to pursue stressful or high-paying jobs where social drinking is more common.
Dr. Jayme Palka, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern, said, “While it is not possible to capture all of the underlying mechanisms that mediate the relationship between drinking and IQ, we know that income influences the trajectory between partially explains the two. ‘
Statista reported that about 54 percent of adults ages 50 to 59 have moderate drinking levels, while between 6.4 and 7.8 percent report heavy alcohol use.
Dr. Brown said he was inspired to conduct the study because of the link between excessive drinking and serious health problems such as high blood pressure, cancer and stroke.
According to the study, an estimated 474,000 cardiovascular disease deaths worldwide were attributed to alcohol consumption in 2019. World Health Organisation (WHO).
It has also been linked to worsening mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety.
“Alcohol is a carcinogen and contributes to about 50 different types of deaths,” Dr. Timothy Naimi, director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria, told me. CNN.
Naimi, who was not involved in the study, continued: “Overall, alcohol is a health hazard.
“The most consistent finding in all of science is that the less you drink, the better your health.”