Having a first alcoholic drink at the early age of 12, 13 or 14 might be influenced more by a child's tendency to do things like lie, steal or skip school than by a family history of alcohol dependency, according to findings by University of Iowa and other investigators.
The study results appear in the October issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
The investigation is the first in a series on problems in adolescence and was based on data from nine sites, including the UI, in the ongoing Collaborative Study of the Genetics of Alcoholism. The researchers compared children ages 7 to 17 from families with a high occurrence of alcohol dependence and families without such history.
To see what might predict or precede an early age of first drink, the team analyzed several behaviors and conditions in the study participants' childhoods: attention-deficit hyperactivity symptoms, conduct disorder symptoms (such as fighting, lying, stealing, skipping school), anxiety and depression, and whether each child's parents or other close family members had diagnoses of alcoholism or antisocial personality disorder (aggressive, unpleasant behavior).
"We found, somewhat surprisingly, that having a family history of alcohol dependency or anti-social personality disorder does not relate to age of first drink. However, the number of conduct disorder symptoms a child has does relate to the age of first drink," said Samuel Kuperman, M.D., corresponding author and professor of psychiatry in the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine.