Why Do Some Teens Become Binge Drinkers? Algorithms Answer.
The first time I got drunk I was 15. It was in a hotel room in Paris, on a trip with my high school French Club, drinking vodka and Orangina from a plastic bottle. I remember looking at my blurry reflection in the bathroom mirror and thinking, So this is what being drunk is. I didn’t hate it. I drank a few more times that year, and then pretty steadily for the next two. I had one blackout night in a friend’s basement. Then came college, where everything escalated. It honestly makes me queasy right now to think about what I put my body through.
But it was fun. And it didn’t lead to anything horrible. I did well academically, went to grad school, found (mostly) gainful employment. I’m 30 now and, knock on wood, don’t have any health problems.
My story is typical. “We tend not to want to say this out loud to teenagers, but most people who tried drugs don’t get addicted,” says Hugh Garavan, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Vermont. “Most kids have tried alcohol by age 14, and most kids don’t develop a problem. Same with cigarettes and same with cocaine. But there’s a certain subset who do, and we don’t have a clue what it is about them.”
Scientists have pinpointed lots of factors that increase the risk of alcohol misuse — a bit. Adolescents who are anxious or impulsive, for example, tend to be at higher risk. Same for those who carry certain genetic variants (dubbed ‘SNPs’) in their genome, and for kids who are abused or neglected. But most studies haven’t looked at enough factors, or at enough kids, to make predictions with much oomph. “It’s hard to look at all of it, but we have this luxury,” Garavan says.
In today’s issue of Nature, Garavan and his colleagues present a new predictive model based on an enormous amount of data—brain scans, genetic screens, personality trait tests, and family and medical histories—from 2,400 teenagers in Europe. The model isn’t by any means a crystal ball, but it can guess which 14-year-olds will become binge drinkers by age 16 with odds far better than chance.
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