Researchers find that high school IQ predicts drinking habits

According to a study by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center, a person’s IQ in high school is predictive of alcohol use later in life. published in Alcohol and alcoholism. Participants with higher IQ levels were significantly more likely to be moderate or heavy drinkers than to be abstinent.

“We’re not saying that your high school IQ determines your destiny,” says senior author E. Sherwood Brown, M.D., Ph.D., MBA, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Psychiatry and at the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwest.

“But IQ levels can lead to intervening social factors that influence drinking, and it is an important mechanism to investigate. Higher IQ seemed to predict a greater likelihood of being a moderate or heavy drinker, but not a binge drinker.” drinker.”

Although Dr. Brown and colleagues at UTSW have conducted numerous studies on alcohol use disorders, he said this is the first to examine predictors of drinking patterns.

Alcohol consumption among adults is increasing, with excessive drinking linked to high blood pressure, cancer, stroke and other diseases as people age. At the same time, explained Dr. Brown explains, research comparing abstinence with moderate alcohol consumption has found a link between cognitive skills and future alcohol use.

“That led me to wonder: If alcohol affects cognition, could cognition also affect alcohol consumption?” he said.

To find the answer, Dr. Brown and UTSW colleagues turned to data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a data set consisting of IQ and lifestyle information from more than 10,000 Wisconsin high school students starting in 1957. The participants were born around 1939.

UTSW researchers used a random sample of 8,254 survey participants who answered questions about their drinking habits in 1992 and 2004, when they would have been about 53 and 65 years old. Moderate drinking was categorized as 1 to 29 drinks per month for women and 1 to 59 drinks for men, and heavy drinking as 30 drinks or more per month for women and 60 drinks or more for men. Those with a higher IQ were less likely to binge drink, measured at five or more drinks in one session.

The researchers found that for every one point increase in IQ, there was a corresponding 1.6% increase in the likelihood that respondents reported moderate or heavy alcohol use.

Income level partially influenced the relationship between IQ and drinking habits, possibly because higher IQ can lead to stressful jobs or more opportunities for social drinking among high earners.

“While it is not possible to capture all of the underlying mechanisms that mediate the relationship between drinking and IQ, we know that income partially explains the trajectory between the two,” said study co-author Jayme Palka, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry. .

Men reported more episodes of binge drinking than women, which supports previous studies showing that men are more likely to engage in dangerous drinking patterns than women.

Because the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study consisted of 99% white non-Hispanic participants, the research team emphasized the need for further research with a more diverse sample.