United States: A new study found that high school students with higher IQs are more likely to drink alcohol as adults, either moderately or heavily, but they tend to binge drink less. This might be because people with higher IQs often have different social situations, like higher incomes or more job stress.
Researchers looked at information from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study and discovered that for every point increase in IQ, there was a 1.6% rise in moderate or heavy drinking. This shows a complicated link between how smart someone is and their drinking habits, but more research is needed to understand it better.
As reported by neuroscience news, Income remains partially to blame for these trends while other social characteristics might also be at work in scripting these patterns. The authors therefore encourage future studies that would help unravel the relations between cognition and lifestyle and alcohol use.
Concerning IQ, the volume of alcohol consumed in later life is greatly influenced by the level attained during high school, reveals a study by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical center Alcohol and Alcoholism journal. More specifically, moderate, or heavy drinkers were shown to have higher levels of IQ than complete non-drinkers.
“We’re not saying that your IQ in high school determines what happens to you,” stated senior author E. Sherwood Brown, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., Distinguished Teaching Professor of Psychiatry, and in the UT South western’s Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.
However, IQ levels might result in the other social factors affecting drinking and thus forms part of the important mechanism to consider. Higher IQ was found to predict moderate or heavy drinking but not binge drinking.”
While Dr. Brown and UTSW colleagues have published many other studies on alcohol use disorder this one is unique because it assesses predictors of drinking.
Self use of alcohol increases among adults and they relate it to hypertension, cancer, stroke, and other diseases that result from excessive use as people grow. At the same time, Dr. Brown said some studies of abstainers and moderate drinkers have indicated the correlation between the actual cognitive skills of a person and his or her future alcohol consumption.
“That led me to begin to question if if alcohol effects cognition, then cognition can effect alcohol,” he said.
To solve the scientific question, Dr. Brown and researchers from UTSW partnered with the data collected from the WLS which includes the IQ and lifestyle questionnaire from the 10, 233 Wisconsin high school seniors who completed these tests in 1957. The participants were around 1939 years of age.
UTSW researchers used a random sample of 8,254 survey participants who answered the questions about their drinking habits in the year 1992 and 2004 when they would have been about 53 and 65 years old.